Free speech will never be allowed to die…not in a blizzard of crooked UN resolutions and not in a million manufactured riots. There’s more chance that pigs will literally fly….
*****
Against the backdrop of 20,651 jihadist attacks since 9/11/2001, and the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Dhaka, Bengladesh (hat tip Jihad Watch) on the march this past week, demanding the execution of “atheist bloggers” for “blaspheming” Islam, I was re-reading V.S. Naipaul’s second brilliant travelogue account of Asian Islamdom, circa 1995, Beyond Belief.
Naipaul’s five month 1995 journey included sojourns in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, supposedly more “moderate,” overall, than Arab Islamdom. Beyond Belief contains this simple, elegant description by a secular Pakistani journalist, i.e., a private apostate, who found mainstream Islamic violence unacceptable. Identified only as “Salman,” he proffered this explanation about the roots of traditionalist, mainstream Islamic violence—which must be considered when applying the term “moderate” to mainstream votaries of Islam:
…[T]he idea of jihad, holy war…was a special Muslim idea. He [Salman] explained it like this: “In Christianity, Christ died for all Christians. He can ensure heaven for them. In Islam, Mohammed can only make a submission in your favor for being a follower of his. It is only Allah who makes the final decision on the merit won by your good deeds. Nothing is greater, so far as goodness goes, than jihad in the name of Allah.” [Naipaul interjects] Jihad was not meant metaphorically. “The word of the Koran is taken very literally. It is blasphemous even to think of it as allegory. The Koran lays great store in jihad. It is one of the sayings of Mohammed–not in the Koran, it’s one of the traditions—‘If you see an un-Islamic practice you stop it by force. If you do not possess the power to stop it, you condemn it verbally. If not that also, then you condemn it in your heart.’ As far back as I can remember I have known this. I think this tradition gives the Muslim license to act violently.” [Naipaul adds] …he [Salman] understood both their [Muslims] need to win merit as followers of Mohammed, and also their fear of hell. [Salman again] “Endless whipping with fiery flames, and fire beyond imagination. Having to drink pus. It’s very graphic in the traditions. In the Koran there’s just mention of the fires and the endlessness of punishment.”
The canonical hadith alluded to by Naipaul’s “Salman,” are cited below, including the delightful spectacle of drinking pus in Hell:
I heard the Messenger of Allah say: “Whoever among you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand (by action); if he cannot, then with his tongue (by speaking out); and if he cannot, then with his heart (by hating it and feeling it is wrong), and that is the weakest of faith.” [Sahih Muslim, The Book of Faith, Chapter 20, Clarifying That Forbidding Evil is Part of Faith; Faith Increases and Decreases; Enjoining What is Good and Forbidding What is Evil Are Obligatory; [177] 78- (49), pp.143-44, from: Vol. 1 English translation of Sahih Muslim From Hadith no. 01-1160, translated by Nasirrudin al-Khattab, Darussalam Books, Riyadh, 2007.]
Amr ibn Shu’ayb reported from his father on the authority of his grandfather that the Prophet said, “The arrogant will be (rasied and) gathered on the Day of Resurrection as ants in the garb of mankind. They will be covered with disgrace from all sides and they will be driven to a cell in Hell named Bulas. They will boil in the fire of Fires and will be given to drink the pus of the people of the Fire, extremely bad in odor.” [From Jami Tirmidhi (2500)]
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.
Losing free speech via the toxic synergy of mainstream, supremacist Islam, and Western self-loathing
*****
By Andrew Bostom:
Al Qaeda’s English language magazine “Inspire,” in its latest edition, has expressed the jihad terror organization’s outrage over the “Innocents of Muslims” video trailer, an amateurish production, which merely depicted some of the less salutary aspects of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s biography, based upon the sacralized Islamic sources.
These threatening statements appear on p. 4:
O Muslims, the film produced in America which insults our Messenger Muhammad comes in the chain of the crusade attacks on Islam. In response to these consecutive assaults, the Muslim ummah revolted in honor of their noble Messenger. The plot of the enemies backfired and became a disgrace and shame on them, a penalty for their insults on the status of the Prophets, violation of the sacred lands and trespassing the boundaries of war ethics. Meanwhile, the status of our Messenger remains high and honorable. No insult could ever tarnish him. Whoever hates him is cut off from success and prosperity in this world and the Hereafter… We affirm that defending the honor of the Prophet is an inevitable obligation in Islam upon the Muslim ummah, every individual as per his capability… We call upon our brothers in the West to fulfill their Islamic obligation. They are obliged to defend the Prophet, for they are more capable of crushing the enemy at his heart.
The violent nature of those threats is made explicit in imagery featured on pp. 14-15, entitled, “Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam.” The images (also published here via MEMRI) are accompanied by statements, “Yes We Can,” “A Bullet A Day Keeps the Infidel Away,” and “Defend Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him,” and include photographs of the nine men(complete with misspellings of some of their names, underneath) threatened with death, ostensibly for “blaspheming” Islam’s prophet, and the Muslim creed itself.
Photographs of the two women targeted do not appear on the pp. 14-15 magazine layout; only their names are printed, beneath the photos of the men. The full list of eleven who were made licit for killing, is below:
Geert Wilders: Founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom;
Morris Sadek: Egyptian-American Coptic Christian who disseminated the video “Innocence of Muslims”
Carsten Juste and Flemming Rose: Editor-in-chief and cultural editors at Jyllands-Posten when the Danish cartoons of Muhammad were published
Kurt Westergaard: Cartoonist whose drawing of the turban-bomb Muhammad became the most renowned of the cartoons.
Lars Vilks: Dutch cartoonist who published his own Muhammad drawings subsequent to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons
Stephane Charbonnier: Editor of Charlie Hedbo, a French satirical magazine
Terry Jones: Florida preacher who has burned Korans in protest of Islam.
Salman Rushdie: Author of The Satanic Verses, whose experiences reflect “The Rushdie Rules,” more than two decades later.
Molly Norris: American cartoonist who proposed “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” as a protest against both censorship and the proscription of published images of Muhammad
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Somali-born Dutch activist and politician;
Predictably, the mainstream media outlets reporting this latest example of Al Qaeda’s so-called “anti-Islamic radicalism” (across the political spectrum, from the rather odious blame the victim Atlantic account, to the factual, if short shriftassessment of The Weekly Standard), failed to connect these threats to an earlier, more egregious action by a prominent Muslim nation: the Egyptian state security court’s November 28, 2012 verdict, which sentenced to death seven expatriate Coptic Egyptians, including Morris Sadek, as well as American pastor Terry Jones, for “blaspheming” Islam—i.e., the same Sadek and Jones targeted subsequently by the Al-Qaeda “Inspire” layout. Egyptian Judge Saif al Nasr Soliman stated plainly when the ruling was issued,
The accused persons were convicted of insulting the Islamic religion through participating in producing and offering a movie that insults Islam and its prophet.
The late November, 2012 Egyptian court verdict re-affirms mainstream, institutional Islam’s Sharia (Islamic law)-based lethal punishment for speech critical of the Muslim creed. More disturbing, however, is the abject failure of contemporary Western media, academic, and political elites to accurately convey that reality—a living, liberty-crushing doctrinal and historical legacy I will elaborate herein.
Andrew Higgins
By Andrew G. Bostom:
In my earlier blog about NY Times agitprop journalist Andrew Higgins, who calumniated a real journalist and historian, Lars Hedegaard, I mentioned Higgins’ warped hagiography of The Danish Muslim Society, and its two recent leaders, whose role in fomenting the cartoon riot carnage – 200 dead and over 800 wounded — Higgins failed to discuss.
Higgins also singled out for praise Minhaj ul Quran International, which he characterized as “the Danish offshoot of a controversial group in Pakistan that has taken a hard line at home against blasphemy.” Diana West, citing a 2006 article “Free Speech in Denmark“, which was co-authored by Lars Hedegaard, notes that Minhaj ul Quran’s leader, Tahir ul-Qadri wrote these words, consistent with the Sharia, on the universal application of Islamic “blasphemy” law:
The act of contempt of the finality of the Prophet (peace be upon him) is a crime which can not be tolerated whether its commission is direct or indirect, intentional or un-intentional. The crime is so sanguine that even his repentance can not exempt him from the penalty of death.
Although ul-Qadri, of Pakistani descent, tried to deny his own words, in a failed effort at sacralized Islamic dissimulation, or “taqiyya,” watch the video, below, which captures his proud championing of Pakistan’s blasphemy law and its lethal consequences for non-Muslims, in particular.
These liberty-crushing, murder-inciting remarks of ul-Qadri were apparently of no concern to Mr. Higgins. But Higgins did find time to label Anders Gravers (using, perhaps, a deliberately vicious pun on his trade), “a xenophobic butcher from the north,” because Gravers opposes the aggressive efforts of Denmark’s Muslims to Islamize Danish society. Compare Gravers’ peaceful exercise of free speech, voicing his strong opposition to Sharia encroachment in his native Denmark, to ul-Qadri’s unabashed call for the murder of non-Muslim “blasphemers”-and then lying about that heinous record of support for the application of Islamic blasphemy law.
Who is the “xenophobic butcher” again, Mr. Higgins?
For background on the assassination attempt see my previous post – Another Attempt to Murder Free Speech in Denmark
Chris Knowles of the International Civil Liberties Alliance:
The following is our response to an article on The Copenhagen Post website entitled Hedegaard lashes out following failed assassination attempt.
My organisation the International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA) awarded Mr Hedegaard our Defender of Freedom Award last year in the European Parliament.
Unlike many newspapers, he is willing to stand up and speak truth to power. Newspapers tend to no longer do their job of informing the public and challenging the powerful. Instead they provide a skewed ideologically driven picture of the world. Rather than report the facts they choose to demonise individuals like Mr Hedegaard and in doing so deliberately put them in danger.
Lars Hedegaard has shown willingness even to put his life on the line in the cause of freedom. How many newspaper editors can say the same thing?
ICLA supports Mr Hedegaard’s call to remove the blasphemy clause. Indeed we call for the abolition of all blasphemy laws worldwide. This includes laws that are effectively blasphemy laws that are dressed in the clothes of secularism. For instance the United Kingdom abolished its blasphemy law but incorporated similar restrictions in other laws. It is the freedom to talk freely about all philosophies that needs to be protected by law. Blasphemy laws stifle freedom of speech and prevent the progressive development of our society.
Lars, we salute your bravery and your continuing commitment to freedom.
Chris Knowles
International Civil Liberties Alliance
Lars Hedegaard speaks with Michael Coren about surviving an assassination attempt:
Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist and the great Dane Lars Hedegaard of the Free Press Society join Michael Coren to discuss their new enterprise, Dispatch International:
Support Freedom of Speech
Subscribe to Dispatch International
Why Dispatch International?
The mainstream media has deteriorated to a point where it constitutes a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The fourth estate was supposed to act as corrective to the legislative, judicial and administrative powers but has in fact become a part of the ruling elite. It no longer considers it its duty to criticise or expose.
One survey after another shows that the vast majority of Western journalists suffer from groupthink. They do not inform the public about what is happening in the real world but want to educate and mould the citizens to conform to their own preconceived ideas of what ought to be.
Vast swathes of reality are brushed under the carpet because the mainstream media considers them antithetical to the multiculturalist, cultural relativist, “green” and anti-Judean-Christian ideologies they strive to impose on the public.
This cannot be allowed to stand. The time has come to publish a real newspaper.
On 30 August we will issue a test issue of Dispatch International. It will appear as a print paper in Danish and Swedish with e-versions in Danish, Swedish, English and German.
More languages will be added as the need arises.
If the test issue is all well received as we antitipate, we will commence regular, weekly publication on Thursday, January 3, 2013.
In the meantime, click onto our website: http://www.Dispatch-International.com.
Chief editors are Ingrid Carlqvist, former news editor of the Swedish daily Kvällsposten, and Lars Hedegaard, former editor-in-chief of the Copenhagen daily Information. Ingrid is Chair of the Swedish Free Press Society and Lars of the Danish Free Press Society.
Together with Canadian free speech activist and board member of the Canadian Free Press Society Bjorn Larsen we have set up a company that is protected from any attempt at a hostile take-over.
We can neither be bought, nor will we be dependent on public subsidies or advertising income.
Dispatch International is your paper. We have no other purpose than to keep you informed of all the news that is fit to print – but rarely is.
Let us make this a success.
All best
Ingrid Carlqvist
Lars Hedegaard
Bjorn Larsen
Internationally-known Koran burner Terry Jones has returned to the internet with a film condemning Islam’s prophet Muhammad after Jones helped promote the internet trailer Innocence of Muslims, a source of global controversy. Posted on Jones’ website Stand Up America, the over one-hour long movie The Innocent Prophet: The Life of Muhammad from a Different Point of View uses mainly cartoon images to present Muhammad and Islam as fraudulent. Legal actions taken against Jones’ co-producer, the Pakistani exile Imran Fisarat now living in Spain, show once again how free speech critical of Islam is under threat. Curiously in several respects, Spanish authorities have acted against Fisarat even though no Muslim rioters around the world have expressed outrage against The Innocent Prophet as was the case previously with Innocence of Muslims.
An international relations scholar resident in Madrid, Soeren Kern, has extensively analyzed Fisarat’s background at the Gatestone website for which Kern works. Firasat obtained political refugee status in Spain in 2010 after receiving death threats in his native Pakistan as well as Indonesia for condemning Islam after leaving the faith and marrying a non-Muslim. Fisarat has continued his condemnation of Islam in Spain with his multilingual website entitled World without Islam/Mundo sin Islam. In March 2012, Fisarat also filed a petition with the Spanish government calling for a ban on the Koran as a violent, hate-filled book and threatened to burn a Koran publicly in central Madrid. Firasat refrained from emulating Jones in America after Spanish police informed Firasat that such a burning could be an infraction of Spanish laws “against offending religious sentiments.”
Fisarat explained to a Belgian newspaper that he drew his inspiration for The Innocent Prophet from Innocence of Muslims. Upon hearing of the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stephens in Benghazi, Firasat thought, “Okay, you Muslims, use violence, but we will continue to make films. One day one of us will lose.” Similar to Innocence of Muslims (discussed in detail here, here, and here), The Innocent Prophet claims to present, in the words of Jones at the film’s beginning, an “accurate historical portrayal” of Muhammad’s life, however critical. The film, however, merely generally references canonical Islamic documents like the Koran and Hadith at the beginning without any specific references included in the narrative.
Although the production values of The Innocent Prophet are slightly better than the abysmal Innocence of Muslims, with its cast and crew drawn partly from the porn industry, the treatment of Muhammad in The Innocent Prophet is no less negative. Jones’ opening monologue questions whether Muhammad was an “inspired prophet of God” or a “perverted madman driven by his demons.” Likewise, Jones asks whether Islam is a “religion of peace” or of “violence and oppression.”
The somewhat monotonous narration by Fisarat in the following film leaves no doubt about its answers to these questions. Muhammad grew up a lonely, poor orphan who sought to compensate his deprivation by gaining fame and fortune through the establishment of Islam as a “false faith.” Islam allowed Muhammad and his followers to pillage under the banner of God in the “greatest mafia movement of that time.” Islamic veneration of Muhammad as the final and greatest of prophets, expressed most succinctly in Islam’s First Pillar, the statement of faith or shahada, meant that Muhammad would be “respected forever.” Islam also allowed Muhammad to fulfill his own carnal desires as a “sexual robot full of lust.” Muhammad’s resulting “Islamic trap” and “lie” led to the “worst human massacres in human history.”
Read more: Family Security Matters
Related articles
By Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:
“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross,” Sinclair Lewis wrote in, “It Can’t Happen Here.” But as it turns out, fascism came to America wearing an Obama 2012 photo, filtered through Instagram, and carrying a Koran.
Charles Woods, the father of the murdered SEAL left to die by Obama in Benghazi, reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told him, that they were going to “arrest and prosecute” the man behind the Mohammed movie.
Mark Basseley Youssef may be a scoundrel and a liar. His movie may be hideous and false. He may have violated his probation. But there are probation violators all over the country today, roaming free after getting a slap on the wrist for their probation violation. The probation violation is a pretext. Youssef’s imprisonment is for violating Sharia blasphemy laws. Obama is trying to appease the Muslims who rioted and killed over the video, and to do what he can against the freedom of speech now, until such time as he can get “hate speech” laws in place that will enable him to finish the job.
Youssef had one of the top Federal prosecutors in California sicced on him and the same media maggots who threw a hysterical fit when Ari Fleischer merely told Bill Maher to shut up, have nothing to say. Oh pardon me, they do have something to say. They assure us that this political prosecution has nothing to do with the movie.
None of the violations had to do with the content of “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that depicts Mohammad as a religious fraud, pedophile and womanizer.
That’s according to the AP. But according to the Prosecutor actually handling the case… .
However, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Dugdale argued Youseff’s lies about his identity have caused harm to others, including the film’s cast and crew. The movie sparked violence in the Middle East, killing dozens.
So it’s not about the movie, except it’s about the movie. So Obama has his first political prisoner, probably not the last. Muslims get upset easily and it will take a lot of political prisoners to appease them.
Freedom of Speech? Oh it’s one of those we used to have in the old America. Like Freedom of Religion. Before the thing that couldn’t happen here… happened here.
**********
Shortly after Youssef left the courtroom, his lawyer, Steven Seiden, came to the front steps of the courthouse and told reporters his client wanted to send a message.
“The one thing he wanted me to tell all of you is President Obama may have gotten Osama bin Laden, but he didn’t kill the ideology,” Seiden said. source
by Raymond Ibrahim at Gatestone Institute:
Egypt: The nation’s jihad organizations dropped leaflets calling on Muslims to kill Christians wherever they found them. Islamists in the Constituent Assembly demanded that the Coptic Church’s funds be placed under state financial control.
While many people are regularly persecuted by Islam’s blasphemy law, one particular case made August headlines: a 14-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan, Rimsha Masih, was arrested, accused of burning pages of a Quran. Rioting Muslims destroyed Christian homes and churches, tore Bibles to pieces and broke crosses, while calling for the death penalty against her. Because this story made it to the mainstream media, widespread international condemnation caused Pakistani authorities to release her recently, not by annulling Pakistan’s blasphemy law, but by finding loopholes, from characterizing the girl as retarded—Islamic law does not mandate punishment for blasphemers if they are retarded—to the unprecedented exposure of a Muslim cleric who framed her.
Because this incident prompted a widespread rampage against Pakistan’s Christians, thousands have deserted their homes and are dispossessed. The Christians from Rimsha’s neighborhood, including women and children, fled into the woods in fear of Muslim retribution, while others were evicted by their Muslim landlords. A few Christians sleeping overnight on the ground just miles away from Pakistani government buildings decided to build a church there and make it their permanent dwelling place. “Here it is not anybody’s home, nobody’s land. Let us live here in safety,” said one. Another said: “We have cleared this place with our hands, and we have laid the first foundation of a small church here. Although this is a mere skeleton made of tree branches, this is the holy home of God. This should be respected.”
Categorized by theme, August’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.
Jihad Killings and Christian Displacement
Iraq: What Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors, characterized as “religicide,” continues unabated in the nation that was liberated by U.S. forces a decade ago: “Christians in cities like Baghdad and Mosul are gripped by terrorism. They are fleeing in droves. Today [August 16] it was reported that at least 20 people died in blasts and shootings across the country.” Before the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Mosul was home to some 75,000 Christians, but now the number has dropped to around 25,000. Christian homes are set on fire, bombs placed in their cars; other Christian families are receiving letters threatening them to leave Iraq or be kidnapped or killed.
Ivory Coast: As part of the civil war, Muslim rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of predominantly Christian supporters of Laurent Gbagbo. Since the attack, when their homes were taken by rebels, some 5,000 predominantly Christian ethnic Guere have been forced to flee into the ungoverned, inhospitable bush, or to the Catholic mission in Duekoue. The priest there reported that the mission has also been threatened by “crowds of angry youths.”
Mali: As many as 200,000 Christians are fleeing to Algeria and Mauritania, where they are seeking a safe haven from Islamic terrorists linked to al-Qaeda, who have become increasingly active in the northern regions of the nation.
Nigeria: The Islamic terrorist organization Boko Haram [Western Education is a Sin] continued its jihad [holy war] to purge north Nigeria of all Christians. In one instance, gunmen murdered a 57-year-old evangelist of a Pentecostal church. When threatened earlier, he had said “I leave everything in the hands of God.”
Syria: Some 12,000 people were blockaded in the predominantly Christian town of Rableh by anti-government forces; they killed several people trying to leave and refused the entry of food and medical supplies. Government forces had reportedly driven out the opposition by August 24. Christians were also given an ultimatum to leave the nearby cities of Qusayr and Homs, which has been almost entirely cleansed of its 50,000-60,000 Christian population. The predominantly Christian part of Aleppo was also hit by heavy fighting earlier this month; and a car bomb was detonated in the predominantly Christian area of Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, as “a crowd of faithful, families, elderly people, women and children, were heading to the cemetery to bury two young people who had died a day earlier, on August 27, also victims of an IED. Twelve died (other sources say as many as 27), including five children, and injuring more than 50 people.” Further, “a family of Armenian Christians was found murdered, and all members of the family horribly decapitated.”
Church Attacks
Azerbaijan: The highest appeals court upheld the decision to close Greater Grace Church, “the first religious community to be liquidated by a court since the country’s harsh new religion law came into force in 2009.” The church, registered since 1993, had provided a place for Christian worship and teaching for almost 20 years; and with a congregation of nearly 500, was one of the larger Protestant churches in the country.
Indonesia: Two churches were the latest to be forcibly closed in West Java: First, a “large tent” used for services by St. Johannes Baptista Church in Bogor was sealed off by authorities on August 7. The congregation had been using the tent since 2006 as a temporary location while they awaited a permit for a proper building, for which it had applied in 2000. Police threatened to “tear down” the tent if the Christians continued to use it; the church leader suspects the hostility is linked to the growth of the congregation, which now numbers around 500. Second, Batak Karo Protestant Church in Bandung was sealed off by protesters who claimed that the congregation had earlier agreed not to use the building, even though it now has all necessary permits to hold service.
Kenya: After a fight ensued between the supporters of a Muslim cleric who had died and the police, a church near the mosque where the funeral was being held was set on fire, and another church was attacked. Separately, another church was attacked and looted “by an armed mob,” believed to be sympathizers of the al-Shabaab terrorist organization. In the words of the pastor who witnessed the pillage, “attackers armed with guns stormed the compound and immediately began pulling down one iron sheet after another, and soon 60 iron sheets were gone. It was a terrible sight to watch the walls of the church come down, [but] I could not shout for help because the attackers could gun me down. Shocked and dismayed, the church’s 60 congregants arrived for worship the next day to find their church building in ruins.” Police were told that there were threats of an attack and that local Muslims were saying things such as “we do not want infidels in this area,” but did nothing. These latest attacks “came only one week after al-Shabab militants hurled grenades into the African Inland Church of Garissa, in eastern Kenya, and opened fire on congregants, killing 17 people, including 15 worshippers. Grenades were also thrown at the local Catholic church.” More than 14 churches have been attacked in Kenya since April.
Nigeria: Gunmen, probably connected with the jihadi organization Boko Haram, “stormed the Deeper Life Church, where Christian worshippers were gathered in prayer, and surrounded the church in the middle of a worship service and opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles on the worshippers.” At least 19 of them were killed, including the pastor. The following day, an unexploded bomb was discovered at Revival Church.
Syria: Gunmen attacked the Catholic monastery of Mar Musa, which dates from the 4th century, and is located north of Damascus. None of the monks was hurt, although the monastery was, in the words of Father Dall’Oglio, “sacked,” and “gunmen stole everything they could steal,” including tractors and other agricultural tools.
Apostasy, Blasphemy, Proselytism
Egypt: A Christian man accused of defaming Islam was arrested after a complaint in which he was accused of posting opinions in Facebook which insulted Muhammad. Insults to Islam and the prophet are considered crimes in Egypt under Article 98(f) of the Penal Code, which states: “Confinement for a period of not less than six months and not exceeding five years… shall be the penalty inflicted on whoever makes use of religion in propagating, either by words, in writing, or in any other means, extreme ideas for the purpose of inciting strife, ridiculing or insulting a heavenly religion or a sect following it, or damaging national unity.”
Pakistan: After a Pakistani flag with the name of “Allah” on it accidentally blew from a Christian’s property to a Muslim’s, the Muslim accused the Christian of deliberately trying to blaspheme the name of Allah. This accusation was advertised in the local mosques, and prompted enraged Muslims to threaten to burn down the homes of the 15 Christian families in the area. Also, a Christian pastor, who had preached among Muslims, some of whom showed interest in converting, was threatened and subsequently kidnapped.
Tanzania: A 17-year-old girl, Eva Abdullah, who had abandoned Islam three years ago to convert to Christianity, was sentenced to two years in prison after being accused of desecrating the Quran. Her parents had disowned her and “a group of radicals” tried to “persuade” her to renounce her Christian faith. When she refused, they falsely accused her of desecrating a Quran.
Tunisia: The nation’s ruling Islamist party filed a bill to criminalize offenses against “sacred values.” “Crimes” would mandate prison terms and fines for broadly worded offenses, such as insulting or mocking the “sanctity of religion.” Among other things, the bill also codifies the levels of offense to religious feelings, including “insults, profanity, derision and representation of Allah and Mohammed.”
Dhimmitude
[General Abuse, Debasement, and Suppression of Non-Muslims as "Tolerated" Citizens]
Egypt: The nation’s jihad organizations dropped leaflets calling on Muslims to kill Christians wherever they found them. Coptic shop owners who sell Christian icons and statues received threatening letters. Muslim “gangs” plundered and kidnapped for ransom Christians. Islamists in the Constituent Assembly demanded that the Coptic Church’s funds be placed under state financial control, a measure categorically rejected by Copts: the state in no way funds the Church, even though mosques are funded by taxpayers, including Christians. Condemning the proposal, the acting Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church said the demand has only one meaning: “that Copts are clearly persecuted.” Despite promising greater representation for Egypt’s Copts, President Morsi broke his word and allowed only one Copt, a female, to represent the nation’s 10-14% Christians in the newly formed Cabinet: “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts especially after the number of ministries increased to 35. But the formation ignored all the known rights and concepts of citizenship,” said the acting Patriarch: “It is not right that Copts get treated in this way.” When Egypt’s Constituent Assembly proposed a law to criminalize “forced labor, slavery, the trafficking of women and children, human organs, and the sex trade,” from which Christians, especially females, would benefit, the Islamist party complained.
Iran: According to Mohabat News, authorities “raise[d] unsubstantiated charges” against five arrested converts to Christianity to “pressure” and “intimidate” them, including by falsely accusing them of desecrating the Quran, and holding them for indefinite periods. “Although their situation is still unclear six months after their arrest, there is no doubt that the Christians’ only crime is related to their faith in Jesus Christ.”
Pakistan: Eleven Christian student nurses were poisoned with mercury in their tea. It is believed that the Christian women were targeted as punishment for drinking tea while their Muslim colleagues were fasting during the month of Ramadan. And a 56-year-old Christian woman at the Karachi Press Club recounted how she and her family were enslaved and forced to work without pay, and tortured and beaten. Muslim “feudal lords” are threatening her and her extended family, with, among other charges, accusations of blasphemy: “Please protect us,” they said. “We don’t want to go back.”
Saudi Arabia: The last of the 35 Ethiopian Christians held in detention since December after being arrested for holding a prayer meeting in a private home was deported home: “We have arrived home safe,” one of the released said: “We believe that we are released as the result of the pressure exerted by ICC and others. The Saudi officials do not tolerate any religions other than Islam. They consider non-Muslims unbelievers. They are full of hatred towards non-Muslims.”
Syria: A number of Melchite Greek Catholic priests, including the archbishop, fled to Lebanon after their offices were ransacked. According to Fides, “unidentified groups who want to feed a religious war and drag the Syrian population into sectarian conflicts” attacked the Christian area in the old quarter of Aleppo. A Byzantine Christian museum and an office of the Maronite Christian faith were also damaged.
Turkey: The chairman of Parliament’s education committee is accusing the French government of “planting seeds of hate” with its move to include the Armenian genocide in history and geography books used in French secondary schools. Armenia, backed by many historians, says that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what is now eastern Turkey during World War I in a deliberate policy of genocide ordered by the Ottoman government.
Uzbekistan: A 26-year-old Christian woman, paralyzed from youth, and her mother were violently attacked by six men with sticks who broke into their home at 4 a.m. The men ransacked the home, confiscating icons, bibles, religious calendars and prayer books. When the paralyzed woman furtively tried to phone for help, she was beaten again. They were all taken to the police department, where the woman was “offered to convert to Islam.” She refused, and the judge eventually “decided that the women had resisted police and had stored the banned religious literature at home and conducted missionary activities. He fined them 20 minimum monthly wages each.”
About this Series
Because the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world is on its way to reaching epidemic proportions, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that surface each month. It serves two purposes:
Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam; apostasy and blasphemy laws that criminalize and punish with death those who “offend” Islam; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like dhimmis, or second-class, “tolerated” citizens; and simple violence and murder. Sometimes it is a combination.
Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the West, to India in the East, and throughout the West wherever there are Muslims—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
By Andrew Bostom:
During his speech to the UN General Assembly yesterday (Tuesday, 9/25/12) Mr. Obama proclaimed,
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
He rapidly cloaked this bold statement regarding Islam, alone, with a pretense of ecumenism, by adding
But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.
This latter statement rings hollow. Mr. Obama and his State Department have never condemned, let alone actively sought to preclude—in real time and with specificity—the ongoing Muslim jihadist ravages against Christians and other non-Muslims across the length and breadth of Islamdom, often perpetrated by so-called US “Muslim allies,” and/or purveyors of “moderate Islam.” Even on the domestic front, one still awaits any Obama administration commentary on the “Piss Christ” revival, an exhibit originally funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts—particularly in light of their endless condemnation of the previously marginal, amateurish video, “Innocence of Muslims.”
Moreover, Mr. Obama, as is his (and his administration’s) wont, ignored altogether the virulent Muslim Jew-hatred borne of canonical Islam, that is both endemic and epidemic within Islamdom, and has nothing to do with “Holocaust denial.” For example, when Mr. Obama delivered his June 4, 2009 Cairo speech, he opened by lavishly praising Al-Azhar University’s “thousand years” as “a beacon of Islamic learning.” Yet just 6-months earlier, a front page New York Times story (published 1/10/ 2009), included extracts from the Friday (1/9/2009) Al Azhar mosque sermon at this same pinnacle of Sunni Islamic religious education, pronounced by Egyptian-government appointed cleric Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef. Referencing well-established Antisemitic motifs from the Koran (citations provided, below), Sheikh Youssef intoned,
Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61 / 3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth. [Koran 5:33 /5:64] They are the most evil on Earth. [5:62 /63]
Sheikh Youssef’s sermon was redolent with the canonical Islamic Jew-hatred that punctuated the 14-year tenure (1996 to March, 2010) of late Al-Azhar Grand Imam—Sunni Islam’s Papal equivalent—the late Muhammd Sayyid Tantawi. Tantawi’s 700 page academic magnum opus, Jews in the Koran and the Traditions, includes these words rationalizing Muslim Jew-hatred:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], [see Al-Azhar Sheikh Saqr’s Koranic citations] corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word…[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not….[T]he Jews always remain maleficent deniers….they should desist from their negative denial…some Jews went way overboard in their denying hostility, so gentle persuasion can do no good with them, so use force with them and treat them in the way you see as effective in ridding them of their evil. One may go so far as to ban their religion, their persons, their wealth, and their villages.
Tantawi (in April 2002) also reiterated the Koranic depiction of Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs,” and sanctioned the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews.
Consistent with this ugly, if widespread phenomenon, writing at the Muslim Brotherhood’s website in 2009 (identified extracts translated by the Investigative Project on Terrorism), current Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi expressed the same Koranic Jew-hatred, decrying “the herd of Zionists, descendants of apes and pigs,” who were ostensibly usurping so-called Islamic land, i.e., Jerusalem—which Morsi viewed as a grave offense to Islam. With apparent relish, Morsi further predicted Israel’s destruction.
In the end the peoples will remain and the regimes disappear sooner or later, and the usurping intruding Zionist entity will disappear with them.
This hateful Muslim rhetoric and the murderous behaviors it inspires (and inspired earlier, across space and time), originated with Muhammad, “the prophet of Islam,” whose putative “slander” Mr. Obama warned does not augur a viable future for the “slanderer.” Thus, just before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males, Muhammad invoked perhaps the most striking Koranic motif for the Jews debasement — he addressed these Jews, with hateful disparagement, as “You brothers of apes.”
Muhammad’s failures or incomplete successes were consistently recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews. The Muslim prophet-warrior developed apenchant for assassinating individual Jews, and destroying Jewish communities — by expropriation and expulsion (Banu Quaynuqa and B. Nadir), or massacring their men and enslaving their women and children (Banu Qurayza). Subsequently, in the case of the Khaybar Jews, Muhammad had the male leadership killed and plundered their riches. The terrorized Khaybar survivors — industrious Jewish farmers — became prototype subjugated dhimmis whose productivity was extracted by the Muslims as a form of permanent booty. (And according to the Muslim sources, even this tenuous vassalage was arbitrarily terminated within a decade of Muhammad’s death when Caliph Umar expelled the Jews of Khaybar.) Accordingly, Maimonides (d. 1203), the renowned Talmudist, philosopher, astronomer, and physician, as noted by historian Salo Baron, emphasizes the bellicose “madness” of Muhammad and his quest for political control. Muhammad’s mindset and the actions it engendered, had immediate and long-term tragic consequences for Jews — from his massacring up to 24,000 Jews to their chronic oppression — as described in the Islamic sources, by Muslims themselves.
Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan and Khaybar Jews and their subsequent expulsion by one of his companions, the (second) “Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar, epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews. George Vajda’s seminal analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs in the hadith remains the definitive work on this subject. Vajda concluded that according to the hadith stubborn malevolence is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy, and even selfish personal interest led them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “… sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with contempt” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”
A century later, notwithstanding Mr. Obama’s hagiographic sentiments, the persistent consequences of Muhammad’s status as “a good [even ‘beautiful’] example of conduct” (Koran 33:21), across a continuum of nearly 14 centuries, remain glaringly evident. Invoked by contemporary Muslim clerics, governments, journalists and jihadists alike, Muhammad’s sacralized behaviors continue to result in: exploited child brides and general misogyny, sanctioned by law; Draconian, mutilating punishments such as stoning for adultery and amputation for theft; jihad violence against non-Muslims and Sharia (Islamic Law)-sanctioned oppression of non-Muslims under Muslim rule.
Read more at Front Page
Visit AndrewBostom.org.
by 