Tag Archives: Islamic oppression of women

Rape and the Islamic Doctrine That Allows It

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Egyptian woman

Historically and juridically, Islam sanctions FGM for Muslim females and rape and sexual slavery of non-Muslim females. Westerners determinedly avoid the topic altogether.

By Clare Lopez:

The first time that many Americans and others in the West became aware of the extent of the mistreatment of  women in Muslim-majority countries was on February 11, 2011, the night that Hosni Mubarak’s government fell in Cairo and CBS News correspondent, Lara Logan, was brutally sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square.

Yet, those already familiar with the Egyptian street know that the brazen sexual harassment of women has been a feature of public life there for a long time. After all, this is an overwhelmingly Muslim country where statistics show more than 90 per cent of women undergo genital mutilation (Female Genital Mutilation-FGM), whose fundamental purpose is to destroy female sexuality—not only so that men may more easily control their own women but in an attempt to remove ostensible “provocation” from men who are raised from infancy in an environment of permissiveness to believe they are superior to women.

And while Western feminist groups determinedly avoid the topic altogether, international organizations charged with studying the treatment of women around the world typically take pains to avoid any insinuation that either FGM or rape of women and girls has anything to do with Islam. Unfortunately, both do. Doctrinally, historically and juridically, Islam sanctions FGM for Muslim females and the rape and sexual slavery of non-Muslim females.

Read more at The Clarion Project

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The ‘Epidemic’ of Sexual Harassment—and Rape—in Morsi’s Egypt

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Since the “Arab Spring” came to Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood assumed power, sexual harassment, abuse, and rape of women has skyrocketed.  This graph, which shows an enormous jump in sexual harassment beginning around January 2011, when the Tahrir revolts began, certainly demonstrates as much. Its findings are supported by any number of reports appearing in both Arabic and Western media, and from both Egyptian and foreign women.

Hundreds of Egyptian women recently took to the streets of Tahrir Square to protest the nonstop harassment they must endure whenever they emerge from their homes and onto the streets.  They held slogans like “Silence is unacceptable, my anger will be heard,” and “A safe square for all; Down with sexual harassment.” “Marchers also shouted chants against President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood group from which he hails,” wrote Al Ahram Online

The response?  More sexual harassment and rapes.

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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Bulletin of the Oppression of Women October 15 – November 19, 2012

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October 15, 2012 Mali   A teenaged girl received 60 lashes in Timbuktu after Islamist extremists convicted   her of speaking to men on the street.

October 16, 2012 UK   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   A British Muslim, who married his second wife in a secret sharia ceremony, has   been sentenced to life in jail for stabbing her to death in a ‘merciless’ attack.   Siraj Arif, 31, knifed Saiba Khatoon – who was 19-weeks pregnant – with such   ferocity that two of the three kitchen knives he used snapped under the force   of the blows in the row over their unborn baby.

October 17, 2012   Egypt   A teacher in southern Egypt punished two 12-year-old schoolgirls for not wearing   the Muslim headscarf by cutting their hair, the father of one girl said Wednesday,   in an incident that stokes concerns over personal rights following the rise   of Islamist political movements.   Afghanistan   Afghan police have arrested four people who allegedly tried to force a woman   into prostitution and beheaded her when she refused.

Britain   An FGM study from the British International Journal of Obstetrics and gynecology   journal BJOG reports that women who were forced to undergo genital cutting as   young girls have a poorer sex life years later.

October 20, 2012 Malaysia      Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek agreed today with a Wanita MCA leader’s view that   PAS condones the raping of non-Muslim women, pointing out that the party’s spiritual   leader Datuk Nik Aziz Nik Mat had made the opinion clear in a speech four years   ago. Nik Aziz had said that women who do not “tutup aurat” (protect   their modesty) “deserved to be raped”.

October 22, 2012 Afghanistan   (h/t to JihadWatch)   A man in a western Afghan city has confessed to stabbing his wife to death to   prevent her from taking a job outside the home.

Sudan (h/t   to JihadWatch)   The head of Sudan’s main clerical authority, the Religious Scholars Committee   (RSC), has publicly advocated girl child marriage, drawing the ire of women   activists rights who called for an immediate ban against the practice.

October 23, 2012 Afghanistan   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   A second teenage girl has been threatened with assassination in Pakistan following   the Taliban’s failed attempt to murder Malala Yousafzai, an outspoken critic   of Islamic extremism, earlier this month.

October 24, 2012 Britain   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   9 men have been charged in Manchester for sexual abuse of an underage girl.   This case is different from the one early this year which dealt with child trafficking.

Afghanistan   Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) on Wednesday said   that it recorded 550 cases of violence against women in the last month, including   beating, forced marriages, murder and rape, showing a remarkable increase from   previous months.

November 1, 2012 Kashmir   A mother and father killed their 15-year-old daughter by dousing her with acid   after seeing her talking to a young man, police said Thursday.

November 3, 2012 Muslim   World   Nonie Darwish explains the role of the woman in the Islamic ideology and the   laws that control her.

Pakistan   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   The Pakistani Taliban’s battle to stop girls and women from getting an education   includes acid thrown in their faces to scar them for life and deter others from   following in their footsteps. They have distributed threatening pamphlets around   the city warning local girls against going to school. “We will never allow   the girls of this area to go and get a Western education,” said Qari Muhavia,   the local Pakistani Taliban leader, when contacted by CNN by telephone.

November 4, 2012 Singapore   The city’s Muslim marriage courses are under fire for teaching that male students   are to beat wives who refuse to submit to sex, while female students are taught   that if they refuse sex with their husbands angels of Allah would curse them.

November 5, 2012 Jordan   Three brothers reportedly murdered their married sister to cleanse their family’s   honor. She was stabbed 17 times.

Yemen   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   A 10-year old Yemeni child claims her family forced her to marry a 30-year old   man when she was nine. She escaped from her home with the help of an aunt and   went to the courthouse where she waited for the judge to come out and told him   her story. He sympathised with her case and issued a divorce judgment.

November 6, 2012 India   Mumbai’s historic Haji Ali mausoleum inner tomb is banned to women.

November 7, 2012 USA   An Iraqi mother was sentenced to two years’ probation after she was accused   of beating her teenage daughter and burning her on her face and chest with a   hot spoon because the girl refused to go along with an arranged marriage and   was spotted talking a male student at her high school.

November 8, 2012 Saudi   Arabia (h/t to thereligionofpeace)     There have been 5,622 marriages where the bride is under the age of 14 in Saudi   Arabia, said Ali Abdul Rahman Al Roumi, a social services academic at Imam Mohammad   Bin Saud Islamic University, adding that specifying a legal age would not solve   the problem, and may lead to “even bigger problems”.

November 11, 2012 Saudi   Arabia (h/t JihadWatch)   An prominent Saudi religious scholar tortured his five year old daughter to   death with whips and electrical shocks.

November 13, 2012 USA   Iraqi man pleaded not guilty to the honor killing of his wife, Shaima Alawadi.

November 15, 2012 Pakistan   A man and his brother were arrested on Wednesday for allegedly setting the former’s   wife and three daughters on fire.

November 16, 2012 Iran   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   Lawmakers consider legislation that may drastically alter an adult woman’s ability   to obtain a passport and travel outside the country.

November 17, 2012 Indonesia   A Western woman gives her eye-witness account of over 200 young girls having   their genitals cut so they “can control their sexual urges.”

November 19, 2012 Dubai   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   Three rapists who demanded money from their Vietnamese victim, are sentenced   to three years in jail.
Gates   of Vienna has an informative short video explaining why honor killings   are Islamic doctrine. Please take a few minutes and educate yourself on this   travesty of gender rights.

Produced by Politicalislam.com   Publisher: Bill Warner; Editor: Asma Marwan

For more information and articles, go to Bulletin of the Oppression of Women

Bulletin of the Oppression of Women August 29 – October 14, 2012

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August 29, 2012 Zanzibar, Tanzania   Despite ongoing efforts to minimize domestic violence, promote gender equality and empower women, new study in Zanzibar indicates that many women are still beaten and bullied by men including Muslim clerics!

Kurdistan   (Iraq)   The Kurdistan government passed a bill banning Female Genital Mutilation a year ago but has yet to implement the law.

August 30, 2012 Egypt   (h/t to Frontpage Mag)   Some in Egypt’s new government wants to include a new article in its constitution criminalizing sex slavery and the trafficking of women and children but the fundamentalist Islamists are grumbling about it.

Tunisia   (h/t to JihadWatch)   The head of a Tunisian Islamist organization called this week for his country to legalize polygamy as part of a post-revolution initiative to cancel all laws   that contradict Islamic principles. Adel Elmi, head of the Tunisian Moderate Association for Awareness and Reform, formerly known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, said in a Wednesday radio statement   that marriage laws ought to be modified.

Afghanistan   A young girl was found hanging dead from the ceiling of her room in Shiberghan city. The Crime branch police chief said initial investigations showed the girl  had committed suicide because she was not happy with her engagement. Maghfirat  Samimi, human rights director for Jawzjan, Sar-i-Pul and Faryab, said suicide tendency among girls had increased. He said 20 cases of suicides and murder of women took place in the region this year, compared to last year’s 15 cases.

August 31, 2012 Pakistan   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)  Khalid Allah Ditta has been arrested for the honor killings of his mother and   four sisters. He accused them of having illicit relations with some men in the   neighbourhood.

Tunisia   Yesterday, a group of Tunisian women affiliated with the leftist Nidaa Tounes   – the Call of Tunisia party – reported that they were verbally and physically   assaulted during a meeting held in the small town of Menzel Chakeur, located  in the governorate of Sfax.

September 1, 2012 Pakistan   An 18-year old girl was killed by her brother for possessing a cell phone and being in an illicit relationship police said.

September 3, 2012 Egypt   Campaigners in Egypt say the problem of sexual harassment is reaching epidemic   proportions, with a rise in such incidents over the past three months. For many   Egyptian women, sexual harassment – which sometimes turns into violent mob-style   attacks – is a daily fact of life, reports the BBC’s Bethany Bell in Cairo.

September 10, 2012 Saudi   Arabia   Saudi authorities have sentenced Najla Yehya Wafa, a 35-year-old Egyptian woman, to 500 lashes. Her family says she was arrested after a business dispute with   a Saudi Princess. Leila Jamul, a 23-year-old Sudanese woman, was sentenced last July to death by stoning for adultery. She is being held in prison, meanwhile, with her six-month-old baby.

Britain   (h/t to NewEnglishReview)   Muslim cleric at the centre of an illegal marriage scandal has stepped down   after he allegedly offered to marry a 12-year-old girl to a man in his 20s. Imam Mohamed Kassamali is said to have told an undercover reporter posing as   a father that he could carry out a ceremony for his school-aged daughter. He allegedly told the Sunday Times journalist: ‘If it (the marriage) was not possible, I would have told you straight away… I would love the girl to go to her husband’s houses (sic) as soon as possible, the younger the better.

September 15, 2012 Afghanistan   A 16-year old girl was lashed by local mullahs (clerics) in Jaghori district   of Ghazni province on charges of what have been called illicit relations. This was carried out in the absence of legal and humanitarian institutions.

September 16, 2012 Saudi   Arabia   A Saudi scholar has played down an Islamic fatwa (ruling) that forbids women from logging in online without an escort. “The law for internet usage for men and women should be the same, even if the internet has useful and harmful websites,” said Sheikh Mohamed El-Aly, professor of Islamic law. In 2010,   Sheikh Saad El-Ghamdi issued a fatwa banning women from logging in online without a chaperon sitting at her side.

Egypt   A 20-year-old Egyptian woman was murdered earlier this month after being sexually assaulted. According to their statement on the incident in Upper Egypt’s Assuit, the young woman had been walking on a main street with a friend when a man began   grabbing her body.

She then turned around and spit in his face and reportedly verbally lashed   back, saying “I will get my rights back. I will get my rights back against your will.” The ECWR said that after she said the words, the man pushed her to the ground, kicking her before shooting her multiple times.

September 17, 2012 Egypt   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   Egyptian security in the city of Suez reported that it arrested 22 men for sexually harassing high school students outside of two schools on the first day of classes, the al-Shorouk newspaper reported on Sunday. Earlier this month, the head of the National Council of Women (NCW) Mervat Tallawy said that Egyptian women are harassed, on average, “7 times every 200 meters.”

Indonesia   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   A sixteen year old girl hanged herself after being arrested by the sharia police for being out in the early hours of the morning and accused of being a prostitute. More HERE.

September 19, 2012 Egypt   An Egyptian women’s group is afraid that the new constitution will sanction the sharia law that allows marriage of sexually mature girls even if they are   at the age of nine.

September 21, 2012 England   (h/t to GatesofVienna)   A teenage rape victim had to take medication after she was attacked amid fears she may have contracted HIV. Mawawe Ibrahim Karam was jailed for ten years yesterday for raping the 17-year-old.

September 22, 2012 Pakistan  The daughter of a cleric was allegedly stripped and paraded naked in a village by young men seeking revenge for her brother’s ‘indiscretions’ on Wednesday in the area of Nawan Lahore police station.

September 24, 2012 Mali   To avoid being whipped, mutilated, and jailed, women in Timbuktu now have to wear black veils and loose-fitting clothing. Radical Islamists, who took control of the city months ago, are laying down their law – Sharia law – and for the first time since they’ve arrived, they’re specifically targeting women.
Over the past few weeks, Islamists from two armed groups – Ansar Dine and Mujao,   who took over northern Mali in April – have increasingly made use of corporal punishment against the local population. This includes whipping, amputations, and even stoning people to death who do not obey Sharia law. More HERE.

September 26, 2012 Egypt     An Egyptian honor killing is caught on video. Viewer discretion advised.

Pakistan   (h/t to GatesofVienna)   A sixteen year old Christian girl was gang-raped for hours by young Muslim men.

September 28, 2012 Turkey   A 15-year-old girl in the southern province of Adana is believed to have killed herself to escape her husband’s violence. According to neighbors Emrah E., who is eight years older than child bride Kübra Ulas, had kidnapped and raped the girl a year ago. Thereafter, Emrah E. threatened Ulas’s family and demanded they allow him to marry Ulas. Afraid, they agreed to the marriage.

September 29, 2012 Egypt  A controversial Egyptian Islamic preacher warned the media that liberals were   attempting to remove from the constitution restrictions on gender equality established by Islamic jurisprudence. “We do not support violence against women, but God allowed a certain form of beating,” said the preacher Borhamy, arguing that in Islam the husband is permitted to beat his wife as long as no physical damage or scar would result.

He also stated (see HERE) that “girls 14-years-old are permitted to have sexual relations under Islam and has proposed reducing the marriage age limit as a result. It is permissible for the girl at the age of 9 or 10 to marry . . .”

Saudi   Arabia   Female Muslim pilgrims from Nigeria who were not accompanied by male family members [per sharia law] were turned away from the hajji in Mecca, subjected to indignities and deported back to Nigeria.
September 30, 2012 Afghanistan   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)  Muzhgan Masoomi’s attacker stabbed her 14 times with a thick blade used to slaughter   animals, tearing wide gashes in her flesh before leaving the government worker   for dead on the outskirts of the Afghan capital. Women who pursue careers in ultra-conservative Afghanistan often face opposition in a society where often they are ostracised – or worse, brutalised – for mixing with men other than husbands or relatives.

October 1, 2012 Maldives Almost 90 percent of the people found guilty of “Zina” – fornication   – and sentenced to flogging in 2011 were female, according to new statistics published by the Department of Judicial Administration last week. It takes four witnesses or a confession to prove the offence in court based on Islamic Sharia. The Maldives’ legal system consists of elements of both common law and Sharia.
October 2, 2012 Britain   (h/t to thereligionofpeace) Police hunt for Mohammad Islam who is a suspected serial sex attacker in Southhampton. Islam was out on bail and has disappeared.

October 3, 2012 Tunsia (h/t to thereligionofpeace)  Outraged Tunisians took to the streets by the hundreds Tuesday, angrily protesting the treatment of a woman who was allegedly raped by police officers — and then charged with public indecency when she filed a complaint.

Syria   There also appears to be a cultural clash between non-Arab Muslims from Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Balkans and Chechnya on the one hand, and Arabs from Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Jordan on the other, over the exploitation of sex slaves.
Some Islamists consider these women to be spoils of war, especially the wives  and daughters of regime supporters, but local fighters are more apprehensive   about the issue. Dozens of women have reportedly been sexually assaulted.

October 4, 2012 Egypt (h/t to thereligionofpeace) Two bearded ultra-conservative men in Egypt attacked four elementary schoolgirls   walking down a street eating ice popsicles. The men knocked the popsicles from the girls hands and began yelling at them. They told them to stop eating the popsicles and go home.
October 5, 2012 Pakistan A girl has been abducted while eight persons have been apprehended in connection of two vani [a child marriage, usually to pay off family debts] cases reported from separate localities of Mansehra.

Canada   The mother of six had her throat slashed by her Afghani husband Peer Khairi, slit open to the spine and slowly suffocated in her own blood. She had stood up to her husband and allowed her children to be westernized.

October 7, 2012 Morocco   Moroccan women (one in three) struggle against violence from their husbands.   One woman said that if she didn’t do what he said or refused sex, he beat her   and attacks her. “He then will force himself on me, but there is nothing   I can do because it is isn’t illegal for him to force sex on me.”

October 8, 2012 Pakistan   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)  A woman has accused a man of the ruling party of selling her into marriage.

October 9, 2012 Balochistan   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)  13 girls between the ages of four and sixteen were bartered to settle a blood   tribal feud. More HERE.

October 10, 2012 Pakistan   A Taliban member shot a 14-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousufzai in the head and in the shoulder on a school bus because the teenager had dared to speak out in favor of education for women and against Muslim extremists.   Update HERE.

Kuwait   (h/t to thereligionofpeace)   An unidentified Indonesian housemaid died inside the Jahra Hospital after suffering  for 18 months. According to reliable sources the victim was brutally beaten by the son of her Saudi sponsor and since then had been admitted to the hospital.

October 11, 2012 Mali   (h/t to NewEnglishReview)  Islamists who have taken over northern Mali are “buying child soldiers”   from their families for £375 and compiling a “frightening” list   of unmarried women who are pregnant or had borne children, according to senior  UN official. More HERE.  And HERE.
October   12, 2012   Afghanistan   A vicious Taliban attack in a residential neighborhood of Ghazni city targeted   Muslim women. The attack resulted in the wounding of several innocent Muslim women and sent dozens of people running for their very lives.
October 14, 2012 Israel  (h/t to thereligionofpeace)  Wife beating is being preached in fundamentalist mosques in Israel.

Produced by Politicalislam.com

Publisher: Bill Warner; Editor: Asma Marwan

Muslim Persecution of Christians: March, 2012

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by Raymond Ibrahim at Gatestone Institute:

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, one of the Islamic world’s highest religious authorities, declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.”

The war on Christianity and its adherents in the Muslim world rages on. In March alone, Saudi Arabia’s highest Islamic legal authority decreed that churches in the region must be destroyed; jihadis [holy warriors] in Nigeria said they “are going to put into action new efforts to strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women”; American teachers in the Middle East were murdered for being Christian or talking about Christianity; churches were banned or bombed, and nuns terrorized by knife-wielding Muslim mobs. Christians continue to be attacked, arrested, imprisoned, and killed for allegedly “blaspheming” Islam’s prophet Muhammad; former Muslims continue to be attacked, arrested, imprisoned, and killed for converting to Christianity.

The extent of this persecution is virtually unknown in the West, due to the mainstream media’s well-documented biases: the mainstream media knows that if they do not ignore or at best whitewash the nonstop persecution of Christians under Islam, their narrative of Islam as the “religion of peace” would be quickly undermined. Last month alone, the New York Times ran an anti-Catholic ad, but refused to publish a nearly identical ad directed at Islam; the BBC admitted it mocks Jesus but will never mock Muhammad; and U.S. sitcoms have been exposed as bashing Christianity, but never Islam.

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

Go here for the list, it is tragically long


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:

  1. To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.
  2. To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Sharia.

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 to those who “offend” Islam; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed 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.

Bulletin of the Oppression of Women Feb. 22 – March 29, 2012

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The Bulletin of the Oppression of Women web site’s in-depth articles are HERE.

February 22, 2012 – March 29, 2012

February 22, 2012
Australia (h/t to AtlasShrugs)
Zialloh Abrahimzadeh allegedly murdered his wife in front of 300 people at a Persian community celebration at the Convention Centre in March 2010 by repeatedly stabbing her in the back.

The couple’s eldest daughter, 25-year-old Atena, has testified against her father. She told the court he was an abusive and aggressive man. Ms Abrahimzadeh said her father regularly punished his wife and children by slapping and whipping them. She said he once beat her for an hour after catching her talking to a boy on the phone and tried to suffocate her with a pillow.

Pakistan
Naseeban Mahar, 22, was set on fire allegedly by her husband. He apparently doused her in petrol, in Daurahi Maher village in Shaheed Benazirabad district on Tuesday.

February 29, 201
India
For the last few days, the Shahjahanpur district administration has been trying to convince villagers of Katiya Kammu to let their women vote on March 3. The village’s Muslim women have not voted for an estimated three decades, the prime reason being that the villagers strictly follow a custom of purdah.

March 1, 2012
Ireland (Hat tip to AtlasShrugs and David)
More than 2,500 women and girls living in Ireland are estimated to have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), according to new research by AkiDwA, a national network of African women living in Ireland. The number was described as a ‘conservative estimate’ by Sudha Patel of Duke University, North Carolina, who conducted the research. It is feared that the figure is in fact much higher.

Egypt/USA
Coptic Christian woman tells about the persecution in Egypt and how great it is to now live in the U.S..

March 3, 2012
UK (h/t to the religionofpeace)
Two sex beasts who laughed as they gang-raped a woman in a city flat are starting indeterminate sentences given by Preston’s top judge. Rezgar Nouri, 27, of no fixed abode, and Mohammed Ibrahim, 23, of Aeroville, London, will both have to face a parole board before they are deemed safe to be released. A third man, who was involved in the attack, is still being hunted by police.

March 4, 2012
Pakistan (h/t to the religionofpeace)
As part of a ‘revenge’ plot, a mob disrobed a woman and paraded her naked around a village in Muzaffargarh district, after accusing her son-in-law of kidnapping a married girl.

March 6, 2012
Afghanistan
Afghanistan’s government appears to be scaling back its support for women’s rights to advance peace talks with the Taliban ahead of the withdrawal of foreign troops, Afghan lawmakers and human-rights activists warned Tuesday.

A government-appointed council of 150 leading Muslim clerics last week urged the strict application of a conservative and literalist interpretation of Islamic law regarding women. The council said Afghan law should require women to wear the veil and forbid them from mixing with men in the work place or traveling without a male chaperone. “Men are fundamental and women are secondary,” the Ulama Council said in a statement on Friday, according to a translation by the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

Spain (h/t to the religionofpeace)
A Spanish imam near Barcelona is under investigation after allegedly calling on the faithful to “discipline” errant wives using physical and psychological violence, police said on Tuesday.

“He provided concrete examples of the manner in which wives should be beaten, how to isolate them inside the family home and how to deny them sexual relations,” said the police, saying they had received testimony to the effect from numerous witnesses.

March 8, 2012
Belgium (translation by IslaminEurope)
Adel B.A. (42) from Deinze was sentenced to two years in jail for terrorizing his kids. His two minor daughter were regularly beaten for not adhering to his strict brand of Islam.

March 11, 2012
India (ht/ to the religionofpeace)
The imam of a mosque at Namazgarh in under Hooghly Mogra police station went absconding after a van rickshaw owner complained to police that the cleric had allegedly raped his 10-year-old daughter.
In the complaint, the father Qurban Mollah said his daughter had broken down on Friday evening after suffering Sheikh Sarfuddin’s brutality for days.

March 12, 2012
Pakistan
Four people were arrested by Mochiwala police on Sunday on a girl’s complaint about her forced marriage to an elderly man to settle a loan her step-father had owed him. The complainant, who said she was 12 years old, told police that her marriage with Sher Muhammad took place two months ago to settle a Rs110,000 loan her step-father had taken from him.

March 14, 2012
Morocco (h/t to InfidelsAreCool)
Angry Moroccans are demanding a change to the country’s strict Islamic penal code after a 16-year-old girl killed herself after being forced to marry her rapist.

An online petition, a Facebook page and countless tweets expressed horror over the suicide of Amina Filali, 16, who swallowed rat poison on Saturday in protest at her marriage to the man who raped her a year earlier. Article 475 of the Moroccan penal code allows for the ‘kidnapper’ of a minor to marry his victim to escape prosecution, and it has been used to justify a traditional practice of making a rapist marry his victim to preserve the honour of the woman’s family.

Iran (h/t to JihadWatch )
At least 716 girls under the age of ten have been married off in Iran since 2009.

March 19, 2012
Britain
A large number of young British Asians support violence against women who ‘dishonour’ their families, a Panorama investigation will claim today. The hard-hitting BBC documentary reveals more than two thirds of Asians between the ages of 16 and 34 say communities should live according to ‘honour’ or ‘izzat’.

Research carried out for the show found nearly one in five – 18 per cent – said certain acts thought to shame families were justification for violence.

Egypt
An Egyptian lawmaker has proposed a controversial draft law to limit the legal provisions for women to divorce or separate from their husbands.

March 22, 2012
Pakistan
At least 943 Pakistani women and girls were murdered last year for allegedly defaming their family’s honor, the country’s leading human rights group said Thursday.

The statistics highlight the growing scale of violence suffered by many women in conservative Muslim Pakistan, where they are frequently treated as second-class citizens and there is no law against domestic violence.

March 23, 2012
Denmark (h/t to IslamInEuorpe)
he Copenhagen Police arrested three members of an Afghan-origin family on the charges of forcing their 19-year-old daughter to marry her cousin in Afghanistan against her will.

Mauritania
A woman kept as a slave tells her story.

March 26, 2012
Britain
Many British Asian women say are being persecuted for the work they do in promoting female rights. They say they frequently receive hate mail, harassment and even death threats for dealing with issues such as forced marriage and honour-based violence.

Algeria (h/t to the religion of peace)
An Algerian man used a kitchen knife to slaughter his 16-year-old daughter after discovering pictures of American and Turkish actors in her mobile phone.

March 28, 2012
Afghanistan
Human Rights Watch reports on the imprisonment of women and girls for “Moral Crimes” like running away from domestic violence and forced marriages.

Produced by Politicalislam.com
Publisher: Bill Warner; Editor: Asma Marwan

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Spain Facing Creeping Islamization

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by Soeren Kern at Stonegate:

Laaroussi was questioned by police but refused to answer questions because he does not recognize the legitimacy of the Spanish state. According to one estimate, 75% of all babies born in Spain on January 1, 2012, were born to immigrant parents, primarily from Morocco.

Abdeslam Laaroussi

A radical Islamic preacher in Spain has been arrested for calling on Muslims to use physical and psychological violence to “discipline” errant wives who refuse to submit to Islamic Sharia law or obey their husbands.

Spanish public prosecutors say Abdeslam Laaroussi, a charismatic imam from Morocco who preaches at a large mosque in Terrassa, an industrial city situated 30 kilometers north of Barcelona, is guilty of “incitement to violence against women” for “providing concrete examples of the manner in which wives should be beaten, how to isolate them inside the family home and how to deny them sexual relations.”

Police say witnesses provided them with recordings of sermons Laaroussi preached at the Badr Mosque in downtown Terrassa (where more than 1,500 people attend prayers services each Friday) in which he instructed his listeners to “hit women with the use of a stick, the fist or the hand so that no bones are broken and no blood is drawn.”

Laaroussi was questioned by police on March 6 but refused to provide evidence because he does not recognize the legitimacy of the Spanish state. If he is found guilty, Laaroussi could face up to three years in prison.

The incident is just one of a long and growing list of Islam-related controversies in Spain, where the number of Muslims has jumped to an estimated 1.5 million in 2011 from just 100,000 in 1990. As their numbers grow, Muslims in Spain are becoming more assertive than ever before.

In January 2012, for example, two radical Islamic television stations began 24-hour broadcasting to Spanish-speaking audiences in Spain and Latin America from new studios in Madrid. The first channel, sponsored by the government of Iran, will focus on spreading Shiite Islam, the dominant religion in Iran. The second channel, sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, will focus on spreading Sunni, Wahhabi Islam, the dominant religion in Saudi Arabia.

In December 2011, some 3,000 Muslim immigrants took to the streets of downtown Terrassa to protest recent cuts in social welfare handouts. The size and spontaneity of the protest, which was organized and attended by Moroccan immigrants, caught local officials by surprise.

Also in December, Islamic Sharia law arrived in the Basque city of Bilbao when a Chechen immigrant tried to murder his 24-year-old son-in-law, a Christian, for marrying his 19-year-old daughter, a Muslim.

In September, Muslim immigrants were accused of poisoning dozens of dogs in the city of Lérida, where 29,000 Muslims now make up around 20% of the city’s total population. Local residents say Muslims killed the dogs because according to Islamic teaching dogs are “unclean” animals.

Also in September, the regional government in Catalonia revealed that during the first six months of 2011, it prevented 14 forced marriages and the genital mutilation of 24 Muslim girls.

In August, the municipality of Salt, a town near Barcelona where Muslim immigrants now make up 40% of the population, approved a one-year ban on the construction of new mosques. It is the first ban of its kind in Spain. The moratorium follows public outrage over plans to build a mega-mosque financed by Saudi Arabia.

In December 2010, a high school teacher in the southern Spanish city of La Línea de la Concepción was sued by the parents of a Muslim student who said the teacher “defamed Islam” by talking about Spanish ham in class.

Also in December, Lérida became the first municipality in Spain to ban the burqa head covering in all public spaces. Women found violating the ban will be fined up to €600 ($750).

In November 2010, the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, two enclaves in northern Africa, officially recognized the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice), as a public holiday. By doing so, Ceuta and Melilla, where Muslims make up more than 50% of the total populations, became the first Spanish municipalities officially to mark an Islamic holiday since Spain was liberated from Muslim captivity in 1492.

In October 2010, the Islamic Association of Málaga, in southern Spain, demanded that Television Española (TVE), the state-owned national public television broadcaster, stop showing a Spanish-language television series because it was “anti-Muslim” for criticizing certain aspects of Islam, such as forced marriages and the lack of women’s rights in Muslim countries.

That same month, residents of the Basque city of Bilbao found their mailboxes stuffed with flyers in Spanish and Arabic from the Islamic Community of Bilbao asking for money to build a 650 square meter (7,000 square feet) mosque costing €550,000 ($735,000). Their website states: “We were expelled [from Spain] in 1609, really not that long ago. … The echo of Al-Andalus still resonates in all the valley of the Ebro [Spain]. We are back to stay, Insha’Allah [if Allah wills it].”

In September 2010, the Watani Association for Freedom and Justice, a local Moroccan activist group, submitted a letter to the Lérida city council in which they asked the mayor to provide them with free land so that they can build a mosque in the city center. The mosque would be financed by Morocco and would compete in Lérida with another mosque project, financed by Saudi Arabia.

Also in September, a discotheque in southern Spanish resort town of Águilas (Murcia) was forced to change its name and architectural design after Islamists threatened to initiate “a great war between Spain and the people of Islam” if it did not.

In January 2010, Mohamed Benbrahim, an imam in the city of Tarragona near Barcelona, was arrested for forcing Fatima Ghailan, a 31-year-old Moroccan woman, to wear a hijab Islamic head covering. The imam had threatened to burn down the woman’s house because, according to him, she is “infidel,” works outside of the home, drives an automobile and has non-Muslim friends.

In December 2009, nine Islamists in the city of Reus, also near Barcelona, kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery based on Sharia law, and condemned her to death. The woman just barely managed to escape being executed by fleeing to a local police station.

In another case, a court in Barcelona found Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, a Muslim cleric at a mosque in the southern Spanish city of Fuengirola, guilty of inciting violence against women after he published a book entitled “Women in Islam,” in which he advised men on how to beat their wives without leaving incriminating marks. An unrepentant Mustafa characterized his 22 days in jail as a “spiritual retreat.”

These conflicts — and hundreds more like them — are a harbinger of things to come, especially as the Muslim population in Spain is poised to skyrocket.

Muslim fertility rates are more than double those of an aging native Spanish population. Spain currently has a birth rate of around 1.4, which is far below the 2.1 required for a population to replace itself. At the current rates, demographers say the number of native Spaniards will be reduced to half in about two generations, while during that same period, the Muslim population in Spain will quadruple.

The first child born in Spain in 2012 was Fatima, whose parents are Muslim. According to one estimate, 75% of all babies born in Spain on January 1, 2012 were born to immigrant parents, primarily from Morocco.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.


Bulletin of Christian Persecution Bulletin of Christian Persecution January 29 – February 29, 2012

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Produced by politicalislam.com
Publisher: Bill Warner; Edited by Asma Marwan

Bulletin of Christian Persecution

January 29 – February 29, 2012

January 29, 2012
Iran (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
Ms. Leila Mohammadi, a Christian convert who resided east of Tehran, was sentenced to two years of imprisonment after enduring 5 months of uncertainty in notorious Evin prison.

January 30, 2012
Saudi Arabia
Thirty-five Ethiopian Christians, 29 of them women, face deportation from Saudi Arabia for “illicit mingling” after police raided a private prayer gathering, Human Rights Watch said on Monday. The New York-based watchdog said the women were subjected to “unwarranted strip search,” while the men were beaten and insulted as “unbelievers”.

The group was arrested on December 15 in a private home in Jeddah as they gathered to pray ahead of Christmas in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom which bans the practice of any religious rites except those of Islam. More HERE.

Mid-East Arab Spring Update (hat tip to JihadWatch)

Pakistan
A judge has denied bail to a young Christian man charged with desecrating the Quran under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws despite the lack of evidence against him, sources said.

Cameroon (h/t to thereligionofoeace)
Christian converts in northern Cameroon are coming under intensifying pressure following a warning from militant Muslims to return to Islam or “face Allah’s wrath”.

January 31, 2012
Macedonia
An Orthodox Christian church famed for its valuable icons was set alight in southern Macedonia overnight amid religious tension between Christians and minority Muslims over a carnival in which Orthodox Christian men dressed as women in burkas and mocked the Koran. More HERE.

Firefighters extinguished the fire on Monday night in the two century-old Sveti Nikola church, near the town of Struga. The church’s roof was destroyed but its icons were not damaged, the fire service said. And HERE.

Denmark
An Iranian apostate from Islam who became a Christian is harassed out of his Muslim neighborhood in Vollsmose, Denmark.

Egypt (h/t to JihadWatch)
Last fall, the Egyptian Coptic Church’s lawyer Naguib Gibrael estimated that some 100,000 Christian families had left the country in the preceding months, and that since Mubarak’s ouster, sectarian strife has escalated in the country.

February 1, 2012
Uganda
A [Muslim]group that claims to have executed the grisly attack on Pastor Umah Mulinde with acid on Christmas Eve seeks to broaden its evil mission and has now revealed that it is targeting more people it accuses of being bent on ostracizing Islam in their performances and sermons. They pinpoint drama groups and radio evangelists, particularly comedy group Amarula Family, Bakayimbira Dramactors, presenters on Christian radio Impact FM, other born-again leaders and non-Muslims in general.

Iran
A pastor of a major house church movement in Iran has begun serving a five years prison sentence, for “crimes against the order”, while a colleague has been detained amid drug addicts.

Pastor Behnam Irani began his five year imprisonment in the Ghezel Hesar detention center in the city of Karaj on trumped up charges, said Jason DeMars, director of advocacy group Present Truth Ministries, who assists him. “His ‘crimes’ were being a pastor and possessing Christian materials,” he explained. “In the recent past we received reports that he was being beaten by fellow prisoners with the approval of prison authorities.”

February 3, 2012
Indonesia (h/t to JihadWatch)
A group of 37 Indonesian Christians to be deported from the United States despite voicing fears of religious persecution at home are scheduled to return on Feb. 29. That group will be joined by 58 more in November.

Sudan (h/t to JihadWatch)
Sudan’s military bombed a Bible school built by a U.S. Christian aid group, prompting students and teachers at the school to run for their lives in the Nuba Mountains.

Bosnia
From JihadWatch: Radio Vatikan on Bosnia and the ethic cleansing of Catholics.

February 5, 2012
Turkey (h/t to InfidelsAreCool)
An ex-Muslim boy is beaten at his school for wearing a cross.

February 6, 2012
Islamic Countries
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes about the global war on Christians in Islamic countries.

February 7, 2012
Islamic Countries
A video from MSNBC about violence against Christians in Islamic countries.

Iran (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
Ms. Fatemeh Nouri, an art student in one of the universities in Tehran was sentenced to one year of deprivation of education by the Revolutionary Court for believing in Christianity. Ms. Nouri is a Christian convert who was arrested by security authorities on September 2011 at her residence in east Tehran and then transferred to Evin prison.

February 8, 2012
Somalia
Islamic extremists from the rebel al Shabaab militia in Somalia beheaded a Christian on the outskirts of Mogadishu last month, sources said. The militants fighting the transitional government in Mogadishu murdered Zakaria Hussein Omar, 26, on Jan. 2 in Cee-carfiid village, about 15 kilometers outside of the Somali capital, they said. Omar had worked for a Christian humanitarian organization that al Shabaab banned last year.

Pakistan (h/t to thereligionofeace)
Haroon Arif, a student from DG Khan in Punjab, could not get high enough marks to get into medical school. This is a standard situation for many young people in the country. What’s different here is that Haroon, who missed the grade by less than 0.1%, would have earned 20 extra marks if he was Hafiz-e-Quran. He tried to claim his knowledge of the Bible was equivalent, but this made no impact.

February 9, 2012
Around the World
A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted.

The ratings of offending countries always put North Korea as the worst, followed by Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the Maldives, Yemen, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Laos, Pakistan, Sudan, and, farther back but still prominently odious, Libya, Syria, Oman, Egypt, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority, Vietnam, Cuba, and China. While there is no shortage of incidents in India, where there is serious religious friction between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs as well, most offending countries are Islamic or Communist.

Egypt
Last week a series of meetings were held by radical Muslims to decide on the fate of the Copts in a village in Alexandria, and Muslims insisted that the whole Coptic population of 62 families must be deported because of an unsubstantiated accusation levied against one Coptic man. Update HERE.

Nigeria (h/t to Persecution.org)
Nigerians have fled in droves to neighbouring Cameroon to escape violence claimed by the Islamist Boko Haram group and revenge attacks by Christians. “Everybody is insecure in Nigeria. The fear is all-pervading,” said a Nigerian Christian priest, speaking on condition of anonymity, in Fotokol, a Cameroonian border town where dozens have taken shelter in the last few weeks.

February 10, 2012
Around the World
Muslim Persecution of Christians in January 2012. The beginning of the New Year saw only an increase in the oppression of Christians under Islam, from Nigeria, where an all-out jihad has been declared in an effort to eradicate the Muslim north of all Christians, to Europe, where Muslim converts to Christianity are still hounded and attacked as apostates.

According to the Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year”; in our life time alone, he predicts “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

Iran
Iranian authorities this week arrested Christian converts from Islam while they were meeting for worship at a home in the southern city of Shiraz, according to sources. The sources put the number of the arrested Christians, who belong to one of Iran’s many underground house churches, at between six and 10. More HERE.

February 12, 2012
Nigeria (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
A Mitsubishi bus with six Christian passengers fleeing the carnage in Maiduguri took the chance of refuelling at Potiskum. Hardly had the attendant started the pump than some men on motorbikes, armed with AK 47, pulled in. They shot dead the travellers, including a woman and a baby.

February 14, 2012
Algeria (h/t to JihadWatch)
Armed men raided a church in Ouargla, Algeria on Wednesday tearing down the gate to the church’s compound and damaging the iron crucifix on the church’s roof.

Aidan Clay, ICC Regional Manager for the Middle East, said, “Whether under the harsh laws imposed on Christians by the government or at the hands of angry mobs, Christians and their places of worship continue to be discriminated against or outright attacked in Algeria. We urge officials in the Ouargla province of Algeria to conduct an immediate investigation and arrest those responsible.”

Turkey
Despite some promising developments, Christians in Turkey continue to suffer attacks from private citizens, discrimination by lower-level government officials and vilification in both school textbooks and news media, according to a study by a Protestant group. In its annual “Report on Human Rights Violations,” released in January, the country’s Association of Protestant Churches notes mixed indicators of improvement but states that there is a “root of intolerance” in Turkish society toward adherents of non-Islamic faiths.

February 15, 2012
Egypt
A mob of nearly 20,000 radical Muslims, mainly Salafis, attempted this evening to break into and torch the Church of St. Mary and St. Abram in the village of Meet Bashar,in Zagazig, Sharqia province. They were demanding the death of Reverend Guirgis Gameel, pastor of the church, who has been unable to leave his home since yesterday.

Nearly 100 terrorized Copts sought refuge inside the church, while Muslim rioters were pelting the church with stones in an effort to break into the church, assault the Copts and torch the building. A home of a Copt living near the church and the home of the church’s porter were torched, as well as three cars.

Sudan
Two Catholic priests abducted at gunpoint in Rabak, Sudan last month have been released amid a wave of forcible conscriptions into rebel southern militias.

February 18, 2012
Pakistan (h/t to AtlasShrugs)
Nadia Bibi, a Christian girl who was abducted and forced to marry a Muslim man, returned to her family, of Catholic faith, after 10 years. Nadia was only 15 when, in 2001, she was kidnapped in Mariamabad (in Punjab), a city with a Catholic majority: her case is not an isolated case, as confirmed by Catholic sources of Fides in Punjab, there are at least 700 cases a year of Christian girls kidnapped and forced to marry a Muslim.

February 19, 2012
Jerusalem (h/t to Janet Levy)
A mob of some 50 Palestinian Muslims stoned a group of Christian tourists atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount on Sunday morning. Three of the Israeli police officers who acted to protect the Christian group were wounded by the stone-throwers. Police arrested 11 Palestinians, several of them minors, for their role in the attack. The attack is believed to have been instigated by the former Muslim mufti of Jerusalem, Ekrama Sabri.

Kuwait (h/t to JihadWatch)
A Kuwaiti parliamentarian is set to submit a draft law banning the construction of churches and non-Islamic places of worship in the Gulf state, it was reported at the weekend.

Nigeria (h/t to JihadWatch)
A bomb planted by an abandoned car exploded outside a church in the middle of a worship service Sunday near Nigeria’s capital, wounding five people amid a continuing wave of violence by a radical Islamist sect, authorities and witnesses said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast outside the Christ Embassy church in Suleja, a city near the nation’s capital Abuja. However, the area has been targeted in the past by the sect known as Boko Haram – including the Christmas Day car bombing of a Catholic church nearby that killed at least 44 people. More HERE.

February 22, 2012
Iran
A trial court in Iran has issued its final verdict, ordering a Christian pastor to be put to death for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity, according to sources close to the pastor and his legal team.

Supporters fear Youcef Nadarkhani, a 34-year-old father of two who was arrested over two years ago on charges of apostasy, may now be executed at any time without prior warning, as death sentences in Iran may be carried out immediately or dragged out for years.

Syria
“Christians are the minority most threatened by Syria’s civil war and are trying to flee the country. They feel defenceless against the escalation of violence that has raged in the country for months. Pray for peace and the reconciliation of the Syrian people!” Mgr Antoine Audo, Caldean archbishop of Aleppo, told AsiaNews.

February 23, 2012
Pakistan
Saira Khokhar, who teaches at the City Foundation School in Lahore, is accused of burning a copy of the Qur’an. However, the case is still shrouded in mystery. Police took Ms Khokhar into custody and launched an informal investigation. No First Information Report has been filed yet, but Christian activists and organisation along with the special adviser to the prime minister on minority affairs, Paul Bhatti, are closely monitoring developments to ensure her safety and rights.

Pakistan
A dozen armed Muslims stormed the Grace Ministry Church in Faisalabad, seriously wounding two Christians. Sajid Masih was hit by bullets and is in critical condition in hospital, the man risks having his amputated arm. Another member of the Protestant community, Boota Masih, was pushed from the roof – a height of about six meters – after being struck repeatedly with a rifle butt.

February 24, 2012
Pakistan
A rich Muslim landowner abducted a Christian man in Faisalabad for failure to repay a debt he had contracted and not repaid whilst working for him. Sources close to the Christian man’s family said the latter left the job tired of being exploited and abused for a pittance. Only the intervention of the National Commission for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Church of Pakistan led to the man’s release and a peaceful resolution of the issue.

Egypt
Coptic Christians in Egypt fear for their future under an Islamist government.

February 26, 2012
Nigeria (h/t to Persecution.org)
Fear and anxiety gripped churchgoers in Nigeria on Sunday after four people were killed in the latest church attack. Police said a car packed with explosives rammed into the compound of the Cocin (Church of Christ) headquarters in Jos. Some church members emerged from the scene covered in dust.

Syria
For the first time in the history of the conflict in Syria, an armed attack has been made on a Catholic monastery, reported Vatican Radio on Saturday. About 30 armed men wearing masks attacked the monastery, founded by Jesuit from Italy Paolo dell’Olio. Attackers demanded money and weapons. According to the abbot, no one was killed or wounded.

February 27, 2012
Pakistan
Tensions are still high in a village near here following Muslims’ attempt to seize land from a Christian family by threatening to accuse them of “blasphemy.” What began on Feb. 19 as a quarrel over a pigeon between Christian and Muslim youths at Nawa Pind Sabu Mohal village, in Sialkot’s Pasroor area in northeast Punjab Province, grew into an occasion to jail some Christians in the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country, the Christians said.

February 28, 2012
Uganda
While a Ugandan pastor was fighting to retain sight in his remaining eye after an acid attack, Muslim extremists this month were shooting at his close friend, a leader of another church.

Doctors at Sheba Hospital in Tel-Aviv, Israel, are still not sure what kind of chemicals Muslim extremists cast on Bishop Umar Mulinde of Gospel Life Church International outside of Kampala last Christmas Eve, but they know that the acid is threatening the vision in his remaining eye.

February 29, 2012
Egypt (h/t to JihadWatch)
A number of Egypt Coptic Christian protesters organized a demonstration on Tuesday in front of Parliament to protest what they called “the disappearance and abduction of Coptic girls,” where the families of the missing girls took part in the protest organized by the Association of Victims of Abduction and Enforced Disappearance. The protesters chanted “Where is the rule of law” and “no for the Islamization of minors”,”MPS, where are the rights of Copts?”

Bangladesh (h/t to JihadWatch)
Three American missionaries were injured in northern Bangladesh on Wednesday after their car was attacked by a mob who suspected they were converting Muslims into Christians, police said.

Pakistan (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
Gunmen abducted two Pakistani Christians working for a South Korean-run hospital in Karachi on Wednesday, police said.

Related articles

Bulletin of the Oppression of Women – Jan 19th – Feb 20th 2012

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Produced by politicalislam.com
Publisher: Bill Warner; Editor: Asma Marwan

January 19, 2012 – February 20, 2012

We have a new blog that has commentary, opinion reports, cultural and educational information 
about current events that affect women in Islam around the world HERE.

January 19, 2012
UK
An increasing number of Muslim women activists are receiving death threats, fatwas and even hate-mail from extremist male and female Muslims. Their crime: Rescuing fellow Muslim women from violent and life threatening situations.

Kuwait
Kuwaiti women have proven they are able leaders in political, civil and social arenas although there are strong indications the number of women in parliament will decrease in the next National Assembly, say women political activists.

January 20, 2012
Mali
Mali’s President Amadou Toumani Toure has signed a new family law, an official said Friday, after it was revised due to pressure from Muslim groups to cut out sections providing for greater women’s freedoms.

The new version has been criticised by rights bodies such as the International Federation for Human Rights which said “the modified text goes against the very principles of equal rights and non-discrimination”.

January 21, 2012
Egypt
The Muslim Brotherhood won by far the biggest share of seats allocated to party lists in Egypt’s first freely-elected parliament in decades, final results confirmed, giving it a major role in drafting the country’s new constitution.

Only one woman was among the appointees which is likely to further disappoint feminist groups after women won only a handful of seats in the elections. Mubarak had traditionally used the quota to boost the representation of women and Coptic Christians. More HERE

January 21, 2012
France
A short video interview with a victim of an attempted honor killing and background information on the event from answeringislam.com,

January 22, 2012
Pakistan (h/t to JihadWatch)
The body of a teenaged girl who was allegedly killed in the name of honour was exhumed by a medical team on Saturday after the divisional bench of the Peshawar High Court ordered a re-investigation into the case. Rehnaz Bibi, 13, was allegedly shot dead by one of her cousins in September 2010. According to reports, Bibi left home to convince the boy she liked to marry her without her family’s consent.

UK (h/t to InfidelsAreCool)
A policeman was starting an 18-year jail sentence today for sex abuse which a judge described as one of the ‘most despicable’ cases he had ever heard. Judge Francis Sheriden jailed paedophile policeman Mohammed Younas after hearing how he raped a girl who was just seven years old and continued to abuse her for eight years.

January 24, 2012 Kuwait
(h/t to AtlasShrugs)
Kuwaiti police have reportedly arrested three women for not wearing any clothes underneath their abayas at a cafe in the Salmiya commercial complex, the al-Rai daily newspaper reported. The report said that a local boy told his mother that he had seen one of their naked bodies. The mother then called the police and they were arrested.

The newspaper added that the women, one of whom was a minor – allegedly told police that they had just had sex in an apartment, consumed alcohol and “had become drunk.” They had then gone to the cafe afterwards. According to Marwa Tarek, a women’s rights activist and blogger in Kuwait, the women could face a number of criminal charges, especially if they are accused of being lesbians.

Pakistan (hat tip to JihadWatch)
Allah Bachaya has surrendered himself to Rohilanwali police after killing his sister [by chopping off her legs with an axe] in the name of honour but he is confident that he will be released in a matter of days.

He told The Express Tribune that he was certain his brother-in-law would withdraw the case as it was a matter of family’s honour. “I have killed her because she brought disgrace to the family’s name,” Bachaya said. “She had become a nuisance. I feel no remorse over my actions. I am backed by the family. They were in favour of my decision to kill her,” he said.

January 25, 2012
UK 
A Muslim man who raped women to ‘teach them a lesson’ for being on the streets at night was jailed indefinitely today because of the danger he poses to women.

Sunny Islam, 23, who comes from a strict Muslim family, dragged his terrified victims – including a 15-year-old – from the street at knifepoint, bound and assaulted them during a two-month reign of terror. Police fear that Islam may have attacked many more.

Egypt (hat tip to AtlasShrugs)
A foreign woman was stripped and sexually assaulted on Wednesday evening in Egypt’s iconic Tahrir Square, one eyewitness said on Twitter and another confirmed in an email to Bikyamasr.com. The woman, who’s identity has not been revealed, was taken away in an ambulance after being assaulted for 10 minutes. Her husband reportedly was unable to intervene and witnessed the incident.

“I saw the woman and then dozens of men surrounded her and started grabbing her, when she screamed for help some people came, but they were hit in the face,” wrote one witness. What happened next was “appalling,” said the trusted witness, who asked for anonymity. “The men just started tearing at her clothes and grabbing her body all over. When she fought back, they pushed her. It was chaos.” There were unconfirmed reports that the men “violated” her with their hands.

Turkey (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
A report on Turkish young female victims of “permitted” rape, the degradation of women’s rights and the rise in honor killings.

January 26, 2012
Canada
A video highlighting the circumstances of the deaths of four women, three sisters and their “aunt” who turned out to be their father’s polygamous wife. The father was caught on police bug of his van saying, “May the devil defecate on their graves.” More on the trial caseHERE and HERE. Update and verdict HERE.

Pakistan
A Struggle for Justice: Incest Victims in Pakistan (pdf)

Canada
A study by the University of Sherbrooke shows there have been 12 honour-killing victims in Canada since 1999 compared with three between 1954 and 1983. All of the cases involved at least one female victim, and all of the killers were immigrants, according to the study that appears in the latest issue of the Canadian Criminal Law Review. Most of the perpetrators were men, usually of Muslim or Sikh background, and the average victim was 21 years old.

Turkey (h/t to IslamVersusEurope)
Women are partly to blame for Turkey’s ever-rising number of women’s murders, a retired police chief has said in an article for the January edition of the Contemporary Police Journal magazine.

“Naturally our women are in a position of victimhood against men due to the [discrepancy between their levels of] physical strength. It is not possible to say the same, however, with respect to [women's use of] language and gestures. The blame for the murders cannot be squarely placed on men’s shoulders.”

January 27, 2012 
The World
The United Nations (UN) reports that 5,000 Muslim women and girls are killed every year in the name of Islam. The UN uses the term “honor killings.” In reality there are thousands more killed but never reported, or the investigative agency does not realize the death was related to Islamic values. Also videos about honor killings.

UK/Egypt 
“Women are not as mentally alert as men,” says Muslim Brotherhood member Dr. Mohammed Ghanem in an interview with Foreign Policy Magazine.

January 28, 2012
“Palestine” (h/t to barenakedislam)
A video report about the Muslim young women whose father locked her in the bathroom for nine years.

January 30, 2012
New Zealand
For months, in an ordinary house in a Wellington suburb, a 17-year-old Pakistani was held hostage, trapped in a marriage forced on her by her parents and threatened with death.

The woman, who does not want to be identified, was married in 2010 without her consent or knowledge after her Muslim parents learned she had a Hindu boyfriend and became concerned she was too westernised. The man they chose for her was a distant relative, a 21-year-old she had met in passing.

UK
Girls as young as nine are being forced to marry in mosques in Islington, according to the findings of a leading women’s rights group. The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) has reported that at least 30 forced marriages took place in the borough in 2010, involving at least three 11-year old and two 9-year old girls. Similarly, the Ministry of Justice revealed details of over 30 applications for Forced Marriage Protection Orders in 2011, of which “five or fewer” were made to protect children aged 9 to 11.

January 3, 2012
Afghanistan (h/t to Jaye)
An Afghan woman has been arrested for ‘helping strangle her daughter-in-law to death because she gave birth to an ‘undesired’ third daughter’.

Mother-in-law Wali Hazrata is said to have tied the feet of 22-year-old Stori, which allowed the victim’s local militia member husband Sher Mohammad to strangle her. More HERE.

February 2, 2012
UK (h/t to GatesOfVienna)
Shamima Akhtar, 18, was bundled into a car, called a whore and a prostitute and had her waist-length hair cut to her neck by her two older sisters, Nadiya, 25, and Nazira, 29, and brother Kayum Mohammed-Abdul, 24. They had “screeched” in the car park of a restaurant in Basingstoke, Hampshire, when they saw her kissing Gary Pain on April 1 last year as she celebrated her 18th birthday. An “extremely aggressive and threatening” Mohammed-Abdul grabbed Mr Pain by the throat as Miss Akhtar was “firmly escorted” to the car and thrown in, Peter Asteris, prosecuting, told the jury.

The case centred on “honour-based domestic violence”, the court heard, in which Miss Akhtar was punished for breaking her family’s rules. Miss Akhtar came from a strict Islamic family and was controlled by her siblings, but she considered herself Westernised, the court heard. All three defendants deny kidnap, actual bodily harm and false imprisonment.

February 2, 2012
India (h/t JihadWatch)
After Muslim protests, Kolkata Book Fair cancelled the launch of Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin’s new autobiography “Nirbasan.”

February 5, 2012
Pakistan (h/t JihadWatch)
Kot Chuttha police have arrested a man who has admitted to killing his wife, Samina, her sister (his brother’s wife) and their mother in collusion with his brother in a Dera Ghazi Khan village. Talking to The Express Tribune at the police station, Ismaeel said he did not believe he had committed a crime. “My wife and her sister (his brother’s wife) had loose morals. They deserved death. I can’t let my wife talk to other men,” he said.

February 7, 2012
Burma
Four Muslim men gang raped and robbed a Burmese woman in front of her husband.

February 9, 2012
UK (h/t to Vlad Tepes)
A deaf 10-year-old girl was trafficked into the UK, repeatedly raped, kept in a cellar and treated as a virtual slave for almost a decade, a court heard today.

The orphaned youngster from Pakistan, who is profoundly deaf and has no speech, was locked in a cellar each night where she would sleep on a concrete floor and by day was forced to work for no money and was sexually assaulted. Her alleged abusers were Ilyas Ashar, 83, and his wife, Tallat Ashar, 66, who deny charges of false imprisonment, human trafficking, sexual offences, violence and benefit fraud.

Canada (h/t barenakedislam)
The Montreal police Child Sexual Exploitation Investigations Section has announced the arrest of six young men in a case of human trafficking and prostitution. Two underage girls allegedly met the suspects in February 2011 and were forced into prostitution. The girls told police that they managed to flee to their freedom a week later.

Canada (h/t to Vlad Tepes)
A Toronto cook who strangled his wife while their newborn son lay in a nearby bedroom has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Yeasmin was found dead in the apartment bathtub with a scarf, knotted in the middle, around her neck on Aug. 28, 2008. The scarf was left to make it look like she had committed suicide, court heard.

The Netherlands (translation by IslaminEurope)
A 32 year old Iraqi was sentenced yesterday in Leuven to four months in prison and a fine of 275 euro. The man had physically and verbally attacked four Moroccan girls in the Leuven pool on September 12, 2010. The girls were wearing bathing suits, and the man told them that they shouldn’t be wearing that according to Islam. One victim was slapped twice in the face and had to be taken to hospital.

February 10, 2012
USA (h/t to AtlasShrugs)
An Iraqi woman has been arrested in Arizona accused of beating her daughter and padlocking her to a bed in outrage after she spoke to a male student at school in violation of the family’s traditional values, police said. Update HERE.

February 13, 2012
Iran (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
An Afghan woman was burned to death by her husband and mother-in-law.

February 14, 2012
“Palestine” (h/t to AtlasShrugs)
A Palestinian mother waited for her 16-year-old daughter to go to bed, tied a rope around her neck and strangled her to death. The woman murdered her own daughter after neighbours lied to her that the girl had an affair with their son.

The crime, which moved local residents, had remained underground for a while before it was revealed by police and a Palestinian female activist, who described it as “one of the most heinous criminal acts” in Palestine

February 15, 2012
Denmark (translation by islamineurope)
A seventeen year old teenager from Copenhagen has been remanded to 14 days in custody for beating his fourteen year old sister. The brother apparently believed his sister’s lifestyle violated the family’s honor.

The police were called in when a neighbor saw the girl, who was walking around with very little on. The brother had beaten, stomped and kicked his sister. He also beat her with a vacuum-cleaner.

UK (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
A deaf mute woman was imprisoned in a cellar, raped and kept as a virtual slave while a child was stabbed in the stomach for smiling, a jury was told.

The woman is said to have been subjected to years of abuse after being trafficked into Britain from Pakistan. It is alleged that she was locked in a cellar by Ilyas Ashar, 83, and his wife Tallat Ashar, 66, at their home on Cromwell Road in Eccles, Salford, and forced to sew, wash, cook and clean without pay. February 19, 2012

Pakistan
Female traffic cops (called wardens) no longer work in Lahore. Wardens and their bosses said the women had been driven away for various reasons, but largely because of harassment by men and social conventions that discourage women from being out on the streets.

February 20, 2012
Malaysia (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
It was only a kiss, but an Arab visitor blew his top and attacked two women at a backpackers’ lodge here.

Tourist Daniel Gunn, 30, who recorded the episode, said he had kissed his girlfriend on the cheek in the hall area and this infuriated the Arab man. “I tried to calm him down but he got angrier,” said the Canadian.

Pakistan (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
Ghulam Muhammadabad police have taken into custody a woman and her two sons for interrogation about the whereabouts of her third son who is accused of throwing acid on four women.

Saudi Arabia (h/t to thereligionofpeace)
Saudi police arrested a 35-year-old local girl just a month after she was released and court officials said it was her choice as she refused to return to her father.
The girl, an assistant dentist, was first arrested because she left her father’s house and lived with her divorced mother, saying he had refused her marriage and that he had a big family from the second wife.

COMPLETE ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND HERE: POLITICALISLAM.COM

Muslim Persecution of Christians: January, 2012

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by Raymond Ibrahim at Stonegate:

She was flogged — given 40 lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered — for embracing a “foreign religion.”

 

The beginning of the New Year saw only an increase in the oppression of Christians under Islam, from Nigeria, where an all-out jihad has been declared in an effort to eradicate the Muslim north of all Christians, to Europe, where Muslim converts to Christianity are still hounded and attacked as apostates. According to the Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year”; in our lifetime alone, he predicts Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.

An international report found that Muslim nations make up nine out of the top ten countries where Christians face the “most severe” persecution. In response to these findings, a Vatican spokesman said that, “Among the most serious concerns, the increase in Islamic extremism, merits special attention. Persons and organizations dedicated to extremist Islamic ideology perpetrate terrible acts of violence in many places throughout the world: the Boko Haram sect in Nigeria is but one example. Then there is the climate of insecurity that unfortunately in some countries accompanies the so-called “Arab spring”—a climate that drives many Christians to flee and even to emigrate.”

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

APOSTASY

Iran: A Christian convert who was arrested in her home has been sentenced to two years in prison. Previously, she endured five months of uncertainty detained in the notorious Evin prison, where the government hoped she would come to her senses and renounce Christianity. She was convicted of “broad anti-Islamic propaganda, deceiving citizens by formation of what is called a house church, insulting sacred figures and action against national security.”Likewise, Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani continues to suffer in prison. Most recently, he rejected an offer to be released if he publicly acknowledged Islam’s prophet Muhammad as “a messenger sent by God,” which would amount to rejecting Christianity, as Muhammad and the Koran rejected it.

Kenya: Muslim apostates seeking refuge in Kenya are being tracked and attacked by Muslims from their countries of origin: An Ethiopian who, upon converting to Christianity, was shot by his father, kidnapped and almost killed, is now receiving threatening text messages. Likewise, a Ugandan convert to Christianity is in hiding, his movements severely restricted since “the Muslims are looking to kill me. I need protection and help.”

Kuwait: A royal prince who openly declared that he has converted to Christianity, confirmed the reality that he now might be targeted for killing as an apostate.

Norway: While out for a walk, two Iranian converts to Christianity were stabbed with knives by masked men shouting “Infidels!” One of the men stabbed had converted in Iran, was threatened there, and so immigrated to Norway, thinking he could escape persecution there.

Somalia: A female convert to Christianity was paraded before a cheering crowd and publicly flogged as punishment for embracing a “foreign religion.” Imprisoned since November, “the public whipping was meant to mark her release.” She received 40 lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered. An eyewitness said: “I saw her faint. I thought she had died, but soon she regained consciousness and her family took her away.” Similarly, “Somali Islamists arrested a Muslim father after two of his children converted to Christianity” and fled. He is accused of “failing to raise his sons as good Muslims, because “good Muslims cannot convert to Christianity.”

Zanzibar: After being robbed, a Muslim convert to Christianity called police to his house; they discovered a Bible during their inspection. The course of inquiry changed from discovering the thieves to asking why he “was practicing a forbidden faith.” He was imprisoned for eight months without trial, and, since being released, has been rejected by his family and is now homeless and diseased.

CHURCH ATTACKS

Azerbaijan: A pastor has been threatened with criminal proceedings following a raid on his church during Sunday service. Earlier, he was told that “a criminal case had been launched over religious literature arousing incitement over other faiths,” and was pressured by authorities to leave the area, which he did, traveling great distances each week to lead church services.

Egypt: Before a bishop was going to inaugurate the incomplete Abu Makka church and celebrate the Epiphany mass, a large number of Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood members entered the building, asserting that the church had no license and no one should pray in it. One Muslim remarked that the building would be suitable for a mosque and a hospital.

Indonesia: A sticker on the back of the car of a member of the beleaguered Yasmin church saying “We need a friendly Islam, not an angry Islam,” distributed by the family of the late Muslim president, prompted another Muslim attack on the church: scores of Muslims “terrorized the congregation and attacked several church members.” Since 2008, the congregation has been forced to hold Sunday services on the sidewalk outside the church and then later in the home of parishioners. Not satisfied, hundreds of Muslims later searched and found the private home where members were congregating and holding service and prevented them from worshiping even there: “It crosses the line now. The protesters now come to the residential area, which is not a public place.” A new report notes that anti-Christian attacks have nearly doubled in the last year.

Nigeria: Soon after jihadis issued an ultimatum giving Christians three days to evacuate the region or die, armed Muslims stormed a church and “opened fire on worshippers as their eyes were closed in prayer,” killing six, including the pastor’s wife. Then, as friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of those slain, Muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar” appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians. Several other churches were bombed, and seven more Christians killed.

Pakistan: Enraged by the voices of children singing carols at a nearby church, Muslims praying in a mosque decided to silence them—including with an axe: “The children were preparing for mass to be celebrated the next day which was a Sunday. The loud cheers became terrified whimpers when suddenly four men, one of them with an axe, barged into the church. The men slapped the children, wrecked the furniture, smashed the microphone on to the floor and kicked the altar. “You are disturbing our prayers. We can’t pray properly. How dare you use the mike and speakers?” (Islam forbids Christians from celebrating loudly in church, banning bells, microphones, and other aids). Also, a center owned by the Catholic church for 125 years, and used for “charitable purposes”—it housed a home for the elderly, a girls’ school, a convent and chapel for prayer—was demolished, after it was discovered that its land was worth a considerable amount of money; in the process, demolition workers destroyed Bibles, crosses, and a statue of Our Lady.

Zanzibar: Muslims destroyed two churches: one was torched, while the other demolished—all to shouts of “Allahu Akbar.”

DHIMMITUDE

[General Abuse, Debasement, and Suppression of non-Muslims as "Second-Class Citizens"]

Denmark: In Muslim majority Odense, an Iranian Christian family had two cars consecutively vandalized—windows smashed, seats cut up, and set ablaze—because the cars had crucifixes hanging in them; the family has since relocated to an undisclosed location. Likewise, “Church Ministry” will change its name to “Ministry of Philosophy of Life” to accommodate Muslims.

Egypt: In the latest round of collective punishment, a mob of over 3,000 Muslims attacked Christians in a village because of a rumor that a Coptic man had intimate photos of a Muslim woman on his phone (denied by the man). Coptic homes and shops were looted before being set ablaze. Three men were injured, while “terrorized” women and children who lost their homes stood in the streets with no place to go. As usual, it took the army an hour to drive 2 kilometers to the village and none of the perpetrators was arrested.

Nigeria: Boko Haram Muslims set ablaze a Christian missionary home. Occupants of the home, mostly orphans and the less-privileged, were rendered homeless as a result. Meanwhile, a top officer allowed the mastermind behind the Christmas Day church bombings to escape, indicating how well entrenched Islamists are in government.

Pakistan: A judge has denied bail to the latest Christian charged with desecrating the Koran, under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, despite the lack of evidence against him: according to Sharia, the word of a Christian is half that of his Muslim accuser – in this case, his landlord.

Saudi Arabia: Officials strip-searched 29 Christian women and assaulted six Christian men after arresting them for holding a prayer meeting at a private home. Imprisoned last month without trial, they have not been told when or if they will be released. Authorities conducted the strip searches of the women, who insisted they had committed no crime, in unsanitary conditions. As a result, some of the women have experienced physical pain and illnesses, but authorities have provided no medical treatment.

Sudan: Authorities threatened to arrest church leaders if they engage in “evangelistic activities” and fail to comply with an order for churches to provide names and identification: “The order was aimed at oppressing Christians amid growing hostilities toward Christianity… Sudanese law prohibits missionaries from evangelizing, and converting from Islam to another religion is punishable by imprisonment or death in Sudan, though previously such laws were not strictly enforced.” Accordingly, shortly after, two evangelists were arrested on spurious charges and beaten by police.

Turkey: A Christian asylum seeker who fled from Iran because of his faith “was brutally assaulted by his employer with hot water, and his body was severely burned,” due to “the extreme religious views” of his Turkish Muslim employer, who “told him he had no rights and that he would not pay him any money,” after the Christian asked for his agreed wages. He “is just one example of hundreds of Iranian Christian asylum seekers who are living in such situations in Turkey.”

ABDUCTIONS, RANSOM, MURDER

Egypt: The abduction of a 16-year old Christian girl, who disappeared over a month ago, has become a “tug of war between the Christian family and Muslim lawyers.” The court sided with the Islamists, ordering the girl to be held in a state-owned care home until she turns 18—the legal age of conversion—instead of returning her to her family. Coptic activists argue that the decision “encourages Islamists to continue unabated the abduction of Christian minors for conversion to Islam.”

Pakistan: A Christian girl who was abducted in 2001 when she was 15 and forced to marry a Muslim, returned to her Catholic family after 10 years. Her case is not an isolated one: “there are at least 700 cases a year of Christian girls kidnapped and forced to marry a Muslim.” In the same vein, “within the past three months, nine women have been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam.”

Sudan: After a large truck smashed through the gates of a Catholic Church compound, Muslims affiliated with Sudan’s Islamic government kidnapped two Catholic priests, “severely beat” them and looted their living quarters, stealing two vehicles, two laptops and a safe. Later, the kidnappers forced the priests to call their bishop with a ransom demand of 500,000 Sudanese pounds (US$185,530).

Switzerland: A Muslim man hacked his daughter to death for dating a Christian: were they dating in a Muslim country, the Christian, as so often happens, would have likely received similar treatment.

Syria: The Christian community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100 Christians were killed since the anti-government unrest began; “Children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim, including some who are “cut into pieces and thrown in a river.” These latest reports are reminiscent of the anti-Christian attacks that have been commonplace in Iraq for a decade.

Tajikistan: A young man dressed as Father Frost—the Russian equivalent of Father Christmas—was stabbed to death while visiting relatives and bringing gifts. The Muslim mob beating and stabbing him screamed “You infidel!” leading police to cite “religious hatred” as motivation.

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 Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month. It serves two purposes:

  1. To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.
  2. To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Sharia.

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 to those who “offend” Islam; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis, or second-class 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