The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

Both seek to dominate society and to use state power to do so. Both seek to eliminate the Other — for Islamic fanatics, that means non-Muslim religions and secularism; for secular fanatics, it means Christianity and virtually any public invoking of God. The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law. The Taliban wiped out public vestiges of Buddhism in Afghanistan; the ACLU and its allies seek to wipe out public vestiges of Christianity in America — as it did, for example, in Los Angeles County, when it successfully pressured the County Board of Supervisors to remove the tiny cross from the county seal. A city and county founded by Catholics — hence the name “The Angels” — was forced to stop commemorating its founders because they were religious.

This fanaticism has been on display most recently in the state of Rhode Island. This past Christmas, the governor, Lincoln Chafee, renamed the state Christmas tree a “holiday tree.” Though Christmas is a national holiday, for the secular fanatic, anything Christian — or, as we shall see, anything that relates to religion or God — must be banned from public life.

The latest expression of the secular equivalent of Islamism is the lawsuit brought against a Rhode Island high school, Cranston High School West, for allowing a banner, written by a seventh grader in 1963, to remain hanging on one of the school walls. An atheist student, along with the ACLU, brought the lawsuit and a judge ruled that it is unconstitutional for it to hang in a public school.

To appreciate how fanatical the student, the ACLU and the ruling are, you have to know the words on the banner. So here they are:

Our Heavenly Father

Grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others.

Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. Teach us the value of true friendship. Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.

Amen

The idea that this prayer violates the Constitution of the United States is as much a mockery of the Constitution as it is of common sense. Only a fanatic can welcome the removal of such a non-denominational, sweet, moral exhortation from a high school wall. America is indeed as endangered by the ACLU as the Muslim world is by Islamists.

This article was originally published at Christian Solidarity International.

Note: If, while reading this article, you wish to tell the current president to stand up for religious minorities in the Islamic Middle East, sign CSI’s petition.

On January 24, during his State of the Union Address, the president of the United States has a chance to expose the plight of religious minorities living in Muslim majority nations. Doing so would not merely shed light on one of the most ignored humanitarian crises of the 21^st century; it would help alleviate it.

Why should the president speak up on the oppression of religious minorities? For starters, because it is the right thing to do, and reflects American values and principles.

He should speak up because religious cleansing is currently underway in nations like Nigeria, where Boko Haram—”Western Education is Forbidden”—and other Islamic groups have declared jihad on the Christian minorities of the north, killing and displacing thousands, burning and bombing hundreds of churches, most notoriously this last Christmas, where over forty people were killed while celebrating Christmas mass. Likewise, since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, about half of Iraq’s one million Christians have been forced by targeted violence to flee their homeland, the most notorious incident, again, being a church attack, where some 60 worshippers were killed.

He should speak up because churches are constantly being attacked, burned, or forced into closure, not just in Nigeria and Iraq, but in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia (click on country-links for the most recent examples). In Egypt alone, after several churches were burned, thousands of Christian Copts gathered to demonstrate—only to be slaughtered by the military, including by being run-over by armored vehicles.

Earlier I discussed how mosques, some of which breed radicalization and serve as terrorist bases, flourish in America, while churches are increasingly targeted and destroyed in the Muslim world, especially the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity.

This pattern—religious appeasement of Muslim minorities in the West, religious hostility for Christian minorities under Islam—continues and manifests itself in other ways.

Consider Christmas.  The same appeasement that allows a “victory mosque” to be erected near Ground Zero, where jihadists killed some 3,000 Americans, compromises one of Christianity’s most important events.

For instance, a “Montreal suburb has decided to remove a nativity scene and menorah from town hall rather than acquiesce to demands from a Muslim group to erect Islamic religious symbols.” Contrast this with Iran, where many churches were “ordered to cancel Christmas and New Year’s celebrations as a show of their compliance and support” for “the two month-long mourning activities of the Shia’ Moslems,” a reference to the bloody flagellations and self mutilations Shias perform in memory of Imam Hussein during Ashura.

Likewise, the University of London held Christmas service featuring readings from the Quran—Islam’s holy book that unequivocally condemns the Incarnation, which is precisely what Christmas celebrates.  Meanwhile, Islam’s clerics in the West proclaimed things like “saying Merry Christmas is worse than fornication or killing someone,” since doing so is to “approve of the biggest crime ever committed by humanity”: the belief that God became man on Christmas.  As the cleric makes clear, these are not his words, but rather the words of Islam’s most authoritative clerics.

Nor are these just words.  Around the Muslim world, Christmas time for Christians is a time of threats, harassment, and fear. One can point to any number of Muslim attacks on Christians to prove this—whether churches attacked, burned, or forced into closure; whether Muslim converts to Christianity beat, killed, or imprisoned; whether Christians abused on “blasphemy” charges; or whether just sheer violence and killings of “infidel” Christians. (See “Muslim Persecution of Christians” for a list of December’s abuses alone).

The New Year’s resolution for “Sunnis for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad”—also known as Boko Haram, that is, “Western education is forbidden”—is to create a Christian-free Nigeria, beginning, naturally, with the north, where Muslims outnumber Christians.

Right at the start of 2012, Boko Haram issued an ultimatum giving Christians living in northern Nigeria three days to evacuate or die—an ultimatum the group has been living up to, so much so that Nigeria’s President Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency.

This, of course, is not to say that Boko Haram has not been long targeting Christians, as the New York Times—which all but apologized for the group’s terrorism—would have it.

Boko Haram and other Muslims have been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches.  Just last November, hundreds of armed Muslims, many from the group, invaded Christian villages, “like a swarm of bees,” killing, looting, and destroying. At the end of their four-hour rampage, at least 130 Christians were killed. Forty-five other Christians in another village were slaughtered by another set of “Allahu Akbar!” screaming Muslims.

Likewise, another jihadi attack from last November, enabled by “local Muslims,” left five churches destroyed and several Christians killed: “The Muslims in this town were going round town pointing out church buildings and shops owned by Christians to members of Boko Haram, and they in turn bombed these churches and shops.”  In one instance, a local Muslim pleaded with Boko Haram members not to burn down a particular church—not out of altruism, of course, but rather because that Muslim’s home was adjacent to the church, and might also have caught fire.  The church was spared.

Still, beginning with Boko Haram’s church attacks of December 25, where over 40 people celebrating Christmas were killed, the group has definitely upped both the frequency and savagery of jihadi attacks on Christians and their churches.  Most recently, armed Muslims stormed a church and “opened fire on worshippers as their eyes were closed in prayer,” killing six Christians, including the pastor’s wife, and wounding many.

British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks visited with Pope Benedict XVI last month in Rome and defended Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, including the “religious roots of the market economy and of democratic capitalism.”   In a speech there, he urged that Jews and Christians to work together to “help Europe recover its soul.”

Separately, in a speech to the British House of Lords, Sacks denounced increasing persecution of Christians by radical Islam, warning that the “fate of Christians in the Middle East today is the litmus test of the Arab Spring.”  In Rome and in London, he was more outspoken than are many of Europe’s often muted church officials, who typically fear to defend their faith, their culture, or their persecuted brethren.

“If Europe loses the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature, art, music, education, politics, and economics, it will lose its identity and its greatness,” Sacks warned during his Rome speech.  “When a civilization loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children … we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice.”

Sacks admired and was encouraged by the warm response the Pope received during his 2010 visit to mostly non-religious Britain, when “everyone was amazed that the interest was so acute and so widespread.” The Chief Rabbi’s visit to Rome clearly was an attempt to strengthen Jewish and Christian voices in defense of historic Western cultural, political and economic principles.

Unlike left-leaning church officials in the West who simplistically equate free markets with sterile materialism, Sacks offered a more balanced perspective.  He critiqued Europe’s secularism and materialism while pointing out that biblical religion created the foundations of prosperous market economies.  “When Europe recovers its soul, it will recover its wealth-creating energies,” he said.  “But first it must remember: humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind.”   In contrast, the Religious Left, both in Europe and America, prefers to believe that markets are innately wicked and must be usurped by coercive national and international regulation.

Of course, much of the Religious Left is itself deeply materialist, preoccupied by the redistribution of wealth but unconcerned about the transcendence and timeless principles that facilitate justice and prosperity.  But appropriately for a spiritual leader, Sacks pointed to the primacy of the “soul” of Europe.

“We are very concerned obviously with the soul of Europe, I mean Europe was built on Judeo-Christian foundations, even the market was built on Judeo-Christian foundations,” Sacks told Vatican Radio.  In his Rome speech, he described the West’s democracy and prosperity relying on biblical understandings of “dignity of the human individual,” respect for property rights and labor, job creation over charity, and creation of wealth so as to become “partners with God in the work of creation.”   He noted that ancient rabbis “favored markets and competition because they generate wealth, lower prices, increase choice, reduced absolute levels of poverty, and extend humanity’s control over the environment, narrowing the extent to which we are the passive victims of circumstance and fate.”

This article originally appeared in The Washington Times.

It’s not every day that the leader of a brand-new country makes his maiden foreign voyage to Jerusalem, capital of the most besieged country in the world, but Salva Kiir, president of South Sudan, accompanied by his foreign and defense ministers, did just that in late December. Israel’s President Shimon Peres hailed his visit as a “moving and historic moment.” The visit spurred talk of South Sudan locating its embassy in Jerusalem, making it the only government anywhere in the world to do so.

This unusual development results from an unusual story.

Today’s Sudan took shape in the nineteenth century when the Ottoman Empire controlled its northern regions and tried to conquer the southern ones. The British, ruling out of Cairo, established the outlines of the modern state in 1898 and for the next fifty years ruled separately the Muslim north and Christian-animist south. In 1948, however, succumbing to northern pressure, the British merged the two administrations in Khartoum under northern control, making Muslims dominant in Sudan and Arabic its official language.

Accordingly, independence in 1956 brought civil war, as southerners battled to fend off Muslim hegemony. Fortunately for them, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s “periphery strategy” translated into Israeli support for non-Arabs in the Middle East, including the southern Sudanese. The government of Israel served through the first Sudanese civil war, lasting until 1972, as their primary source of moral backing, diplomatic help, and armaments.

Mr. Kiir acknowledged this contribution in Jerusalem, noting that “Israel has always supported the South Sudanese people. Without you, we would not have arisen. You struggled alongside us in order to allow the establishment of South Sudan.” In reply, Mr. Peres recalled his presence in the early 1960s in Paris, when then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and he initiated Israel’s first-ever link with southern Sudanese leaders.

Sudan’s civil war continued intermittently from 1956 until 2005. Over time, Muslim northerners became increasingly vicious toward their southern co-nationals, culminating in the 1980-90s with massacres, chattel slavery, and genocide. Given Africa’s many tragedies, such problems might not have made an impression on compassion-weary Westerners except for an extraordinary effort led by two modern-day American abolitionists.

Several churches in northern Nigeria were bombed December 25, in what has been described as “Nigeria’s blackest Christmas ever.” The attacks, perpetrated by the Muslim militant group Boko Haram, killed at least 39 people, “the majority dying on the steps of a Catholic church [in Madalla near the capital of Abuja] after celebrating Christmas Mass as blood pooled in dust from a massive explosion.” Charred bodies and dismembered limbs lay scattered around the destroyed church.

As usual, the world offered the requisite, if perfunctory, condemnations.  Of note, however, is the word so many Western leaders, from the White House to the Vatican, used to characterize this latest Muslim attack on Christians—“senseless”—a word that implies no motive, no goal, no rhyme, no reason.

Although Boko Haram has been bellowing its straightforward and far from “senseless” goals for a decade—enforcing Sharia law and, in conjunction, subjugating if not eliminating Nigeria’s Christians—one can see why so many are decrying the Christmas Day bombings as “senseless”: the mainstream media’s coverage offers little by way of context or continuity concerning the attacks.

Consider the New York Times’ coverage, as reported by Adam Nossiter, in an article titled “Nigerian Group Escalates Violence With Church Attacks.” After stating the facts, Nossiter writes:

The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…

This sentence is fraught with problems.  For starters, Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches.  Considering that just last Christmas Eve, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing nearly 40 Christian worshippers, the New York Times’ characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only unconscionable, but unprofessional.

Boko Haram—whose full name in Arabic is “People of Sunna for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad [Holy War]”—has, for a decade, been representing a very “religion-tinged front,” that is, an Islamic front, one that is hostile to all things non-Muslim, with Christians at the very top.

In just the last couple of months, Boko Haram has carried out attacks on dozens of other churches, bombing some, torching others.  In one instance, they opened fire on a congregation of  mostly women and children, killing dozens; they executed two children of an ex-terrorist because he converted to Christianity; they murdered Christian pastors in cold blood; they “went to shops owned by Christians, ordering them to recite verses from the Quran,” killing those who could not.

This article is reprinted from Hudson New York.

The so-called “Arab Spring” continues to transition into a “Christian Winter,” including in those nations undergoing democratic change, such as Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis dominated the elections—unsurprisingly so, considering the Obama administration has actually been training Islamists for elections.

Arab regimes not overthrown by the “Arab Spring” are under mounting international pressure;  these include the secular Assad regime of Syria, where Christians, who comprise some 10% of the population, are fearful of the future, having seen the effects of democracy in neighboring nations such as Iraq, where, since the fall of the Saddam regime, Christians have been all but decimated.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that “Christians are being refused refugee status [in the U.S.] and face persecution and many times certain death for their religious beliefs under Sharia, while whole Muslim communities are entering the U.S. by the tens of thousands per month despite the fact that they face no religious persecution.”

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

Churches

Ethiopia: More than 500 Muslim students assisted by Muslim police burned down a church, while screaming “Allahu Akbar” (and thus clearly positing their attack in an Islamic framework); the church was built on land used by Christians for more than 60 years, but now a court has ruled that it was built “without a permit.”

Indonesia: Hundreds of “hard-line” Muslims rallied to decry the “arrogance” of a beleaguered church that, though kept shuttered by authorities, has been ordered open by the Supreme Court.  Church members have been forced to hold services on the sidewalk, even as Indonesia’s leading Muslim clerics warned Christians that it would be “wise and sensible” for the church to yield to “the feelings of the local believers, specifically Muslims.”

Iran: The nation’s minister of intelligence said that house churches in his country are a threat to Iranian youth, and acknowledged a new series of efforts to fight the growth of the house church movement in Iran.

Nigeria: Islamic militants shouting “Allahu Akbar” carried out coordinated attacks on churches and police stations, including opening fire on a congregation of “mostly women and children,” killing dozens.  The attacks occurred in a region where hundreds of people were earlier killed during violence that erupted after President Jonathan, a Christian, beat his closet Muslim rival in April elections.

Turkey: The ancient Aghia Sophia church has been turned into a mosque.  Playing an important role in ecumenical history, the church was first transformed into a mosque in 1331 by the jihadist Ottoman state.  As a sign of secularization, however, in 1920 it was turned into a museum.  Its transformation again into a mosque is a reflection of Turkey’s re-Islamization.

Apostasy and Proselytism

Afghanis around the world are being threatened for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity. One exile, who changed his name after fleeing Afghanistan in 2007 when an Islamic court issued an arrest warrant for his conversion, is still receiving threats: “They [Afghan officials] were very angry and saying that they will hit me by knife and kill me.”  Even in distant Norway last September, an Afghan convert to Christianity was scalded with boiling water and acid at a refugee processing center: “If you do not return to Islam, we will kill you,” his attackers told him.

Algeria: Five Christians were jailed for “worshiping in an unregistered location.”  International Christian Concern (ICC), an advocacy group investigating the case, states that the five Christians are charged with “proselytizing,” “unauthorized worship,” and “insulting Islam.”

Iran: Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, who caught the attention of the world after being imprisoned and awaiting execution for leaving Islam, remains behind bars as officials continue to come up with excuses to force him to renounce Christianity, the latest being that “everyone is [born] a Muslim.”  A Christian couple “who had been snatched and illegally-detained” by authorities for eight months without any formal charges, were finally released, beaten again, and have since fled the country.  While imprisoned, they were “ridiculed and debased” for their Christian faith.

Kashmir: Muslim police arrested and beat seven converts from Islam in an attempt to obtain a confession against the priest who baptized them.  After the grand mufti alleged that Muslim youths were alternatively being “lured” and “forced” to convert by an Anglican priest “in exchange for money,”  the priest was arrested in a “humiliating” manner.  Recently released, his life is now “in serious danger.”

Kenya: A gang of Muslims stabbed and beat with iron rods a 25-year-old Somali refugee, breaking his teeth; he was then stripped naked, covered with dirt, and left unconscious near a church.  Although he was raised Christian since age 7, he was attacked on the “assumption that as a Somali he was born into Islam and was therefore an apostate deserving of death.”

Two years ago as two-hundred eighty-nine people sat on a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit studying their watches, flipping through their Kindles and hoping they would make it home in time, among them sat a devout Muslim with a packet of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate sewn into his underwear.

At his trial Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab said,

“In late 2009, in fulfillment of a religious obligation, I decided to participate in jihad against the United States. The Koran obliges every able Muslim to participate in jihad and fight in the way of Allah, those who fight you, and kill them wherever you find them.”

On Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab “found” hundreds of people returning home for the holidays. Had he spent more time studying explosives and less time memorizing verses of the Koran, his plot to murder them might have succeeded. But had he spent less time reading the Koran perhaps he would have never tried to carry out his act of religious mass murder.

Next year at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon, tens of thousands of people crowded around a massive Douglas fir tree decked with lights. Waiting with cell phone in hand was Mohamed Osman Mohamud.

Earlier that year Mohamud had urged a friend of his traveling to Mecca to pray “that I will be a martyr in the highest chambers of paradise.” Mohamud’s plan was to attack Americans “in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays.”

While fathers lifted up their children on their shoulders and music filled the air, Mohamud was smiling for a different reason. “You know what I like, what makes me happy?” he had told undercover agents. “You know, what I like to see? Is when I see the enemy of Allah, then you know their bodies are torn everywhere.” As American families were enjoying the moment, Mohamud was picturing their bodies ripped to shreds by his bomb.

Choosing a spot next to a light rail terminal, Mohamud waited for a train to arrive in order to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the families arriving at the ceremony. But instead of murdering thousands of people at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, he was arrested and dragged away while screaming, “Allahu Akbar.”

Muslim Christmas terror predates September 11, the War on Terror, the War in Iraq, or any of the other excuses used to justify Muslim violence.

The Christmas Market has been held in Strasbourg, France for over four hundred years. A year before Al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center, European Muslims began scouting the site for a terrorist attack. Salim Boukari filmed the market, remarking at the people passing by outside the Strasbourg Cathedral. “Here are the enemies of Allah as they stroll about. You will go to hell, Allah willing.”

While that attack never came to pass, on Christmas Day that same year thirty-eight bombs exploded in churches across towns and cities in Indonesia wounding over a hundred people and killing nineteen. Cathedrals, convents and schools were all targeted. Jemaah Islamiyah, the Congregation of Islam, was responsible for the attacks on Indonesia’s Christian congregations.

The man behind the Congregation of Islam, Abu Bakar Bashir, a leading Muslim cleric, was tried twice for his involvement in the Christmas Day bombings and the Bali bombings, and got a slap on the wrist both times. When an interviewer asked him what America could do to bring peace, Bashir told him. “Islam must win and Westerners will be destroyed…If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam.”

“Muslims who don’t hate America sin,” the cleric said, “There is no iman [belief] if one doesn’t hate America.”

Unsatisfied with those atrocities, the Congregation of Islam plotted a 2005 wave of pre-Christmas bombings that was averted only when Dr. Azahari bin Hussein, the mastermind of the previous bombings, was surrounded and killed in a safe house along with his Jihadist associates.

What’s the going rate for souls these days? How about $20,000 a month? Such was the deal offered by the National Islamic Front (also known as the National Congress Party) government of Sudan to Washington, DC attorney Bart S. Fisher for help getting Sudan removed from the U.S.’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

Act for Sudan, a new alliance of activists against genocide in Sudan,¹ alerted U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) to the Islamist government in Khartoum’s hiring of Fisher. When Khartoum had tried the same thing in 2009, Mr. Wolf wrote a scathing letter to President Obama asking him to direct the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to deny any waiver requests by U.S. companies seeking to represent the government of Sudan. An OFAC waiver is necessary because in 1997 then President Clinton issued an Executive Order imposing a trade embargo against the entire territory of Sudan and total asset freeze against the Khartoum government. Clinton cited Sudan for “continued support for international terrorism, ongoing efforts to destabilize neighboring governments and the prevalence of human rights violations, including slavery and denial of religious freedom.” Not much has changed.²

On Tuesday, December 13, Wolf, who had written once again to President Obama, went to the House floor to condemn Khartoum’s arrangement with Bart Fisher, saying:

Mr. Speaker, I was appalled and outraged to learn yesterday that the genocidal government of Khartoum has hired a lobbyist to represent its interests here in Washington. . . Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan Bashir is an internationally indicted war criminal.  Bashir is accused by the International Criminal Court of five counts of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture and extermination, and two counts of war crimes.

But Khartoum’s crimes are not simply a thing of the past. . . .

My office has received regular reliable reports from individuals on the ground . . . We’ve learned of ongoing aerial bombardments in Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan states.  We’ve heard nightmarish accounts of extrajudicial killings, illegal detention, disappearances, and indiscriminate attacks against civilians.  Furthermore, evidence gathered through satellite imagery by the Satellite Sentinel Project shows at least eight mass graves found in and around Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan.

Literally thousands have fled the violence.  Which begs the question: who is their lobbyist? They are in desperate straits having left behind their entire lives.  Who is their lobbyist? They are facing malnourishment and prolonged displacement.  Who is their lobbyist?

Further protest of Fisher’s arrangements with Khartoum came on Friday, December 16, when members of Act for Sudan were joined by other Sudan advocates to demonstrate outside of the law offices of Bart Fisher. Act for Sudan reported, “Carrying protest signs and chanting, ‘Mr. Fisher, step aside, you’re representing genocide,’ the activists called on the attorney to stop helping Sudan avoid consequences for ongoing government-sponsored genocide and mass atrocities.” Protestors were buoyed by the participation of Congressman Wolf, who warned President Obama, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the head of OFAC that “history will be their judge if they fail to act.” Jeff Walton, IRD’s representative at the protest, said that the timing could not have been better as lunchtime crowds were very interested in what the protestors had to say.

A recent Fox News report tells of how “a rash of attacks on Christian-owned businesses in northern Iraq has raised troubling questions about the future safety of the country’s shrinking Christian community, particularly as U.S. forces withdraw completely from the nation they’ve refereed since 2003.”

In fact, “questions about the future safety of the country’s shrinking Christian community”  have been raised ever since the U.S. toppled secular strongman Saddam Hussein, thereby unloosing the forces of jihad previously corked.  The report continues:

The attacks, which have received little international attention, raged through northern cities following a sermon last Friday by a local mullah. Video purportedly from the riots posted online shows mobs burning and wrecking businesses, which included liquor stores, hotels and hair salons.

Note the two important facts here that play over and over whenever Christians are persecuted under Islam: 1) Despite their frequency and severity, they “receive little international attention” (indeed, only the most spectacular of terrorist attacks on Christians—such as the 2010 Baghdad church attack which left some 60 dead—ever receive mainstream media attention); and 2) as usual, the attacks followed “a sermon last Friday by a local mullah” (in other words, are Islamic in nature).

As if the situation wasn’t bad enough, after pointing out that “Iraqi Christians … are living in fear,” U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf said:

“Now with the [U.S.] forces leaving … I think the Iraqi Christians are going to go through a very, very difficult time.” … He urged the Obama administration to do more to speak up on the issue.   “They know this is a problem. Our government ought to be advocating and ought to be pushing.”

It ought to, but it’s not.   After calling the U.S. government’s silence concerning the blatant persecution of Iraq’s Christians “disturbing,” the founder of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council added: “We’re on the verge of extinction.”

Sudan is a kind of diabolical Groundhog Day. In the film by that name, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) re-lives the same day over and over again until he learns the lessons needed to change his life and save the lives of others. In Sudan today, people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State are re-living the horrific nightmare from which they thought they had finally awakened after the signing of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. But in this case, it is the United States government that has failed to learn the lessons needed to change conditions and save the lives of others.

Along with the citizens of what is now the new nation of the Republic of South Sudan, the people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State were for decades mercilessly persecuted and slaughtered by their own government. Starvation and enslavement were used as weapons of war along with ground combat and aerial bombardment. The hallmark of Khartoum’s multiple declarations of jihad against its own people is the deliberate targeting of civilians and particularly of Christians. In the case of Blue Nile State, one Sudanese military commander, Taib Musba, was responsible for the killing of 15,000 Uduk Christians in the mid 1980’s. Some he killed personally by driving three-inch-long nails into the tops of their heads. Others were crushed by a 50 ton Soviet-made tank.

Deliberate targeting of civilians is also the hallmark of Khartoum’s current offensive against the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State. Since June 5, 2011, the Islamist regime’s forces, aided by militias, have been conducting an ethnically-based extermination campaign in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan State while attempting to crush the resistance movement of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM/N). And in September they began attacking Blue Nile State, as well.

In June Islamist militias first conducted a door to door search looking for Nuba with orders from ICC-indicted war criminal President Omer al-Bashir to “sweep out the trash,” and whenever they find a Nuba to “clean it up.” The horrific “cleaning” has been verified by the Satellite Sentinel Project. This invaluable effort, started by actor George Clooney, has provided evidence of mass graves believed to be of some 7000 people that were rounded up at the UN compound in the capital city of Kadugli by Sudanese government collaborators and massacred. Since June, regular aerial bombardment has killed many and sent hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in caves and beyond in South Sudan.

To add to the nightmare, Khartoum began attacking Blue Nile State in September. Unknown numbers of men, women, and children have been killed and tens of thousands have been displaced, even as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA/N), the resistance movement’s forces, fight to protect the people and maintain territory. The people of Blue Nile and the Nuba now face starvation in government-orchestrated famine. Khartoum has banned all humanitarian assistance from the regions. Now Sudan’s rainy season has ended and Khartoum is resuming land attacks, moving mechanized infantry columns into place, in addition to aerial bombardment.

On November 3, Khartoum announced the capture of Kurmuk, the capital of Southern Blue Nile State, by Government of Sudan (GOS) forces. These forces include both the regular Sudanese army and Mujahedeen and Janjaweed transferred from slaughtering civilians in Darfur civilians to slaughtering civilians in Blue Nile State. According to Blue Nile Association North America, “before entering Kurmuk the GOS forces used aerial bombardment, heavy artillery and helicopter gunships targeting the city of Kurmuk and the surrounding areas, destroying water storage tanks, churches, schools and civilians’ homes.” Tens of thousands of indigenous people were displaced, injured, and killed. Khartoum may also have employed chemical weapons. Many of the injured SPLA/N soldiers “had strange bleeding from their ears and noses.”

Reports on the ground confirmed that all of the villages and towns in the 100 or so miles between Damazin city and Kurmuk as far as the Ethiopian border were completely looted, burned and destroyed by the invading forces. The Blue Nile Association stated that ICC-indicted war criminal president Omer al-Bashir had declared following the secession of South Sudan that there was “no room for any talk about diversity.” He announced that Sudan was now a “pure Arab Islamic State.” “It seems that after this campaign and the campaign in South Kordofan President Basher [sic] is following his words to eradicate and cleanse the indigenous people in Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains of South Kurdufan,” the Blue Nile Association declared.

Boko Haram’s recent attack on the Nigerian city of Damaturu was but the latest and most deadly incident in the ongoing genocidal assault against Nigerian Christians.

In its efforts to impose Sharia law throughout Nigeria, the Islamist terror group Boko Haram has systematically targeted Nigerian government officials, Christians and those Muslims who dare to publicly denigrate the terrorist organization.

To that end, over 200 Boko Haram insurgents recently descended on the northeastern Nigerian city of Damaturu and engaged in a raging four hour gun and bombing attack with Nigerian police, a battle that resulted in nearly 150 deaths and the destruction of churches, mosques and police stations.

However, reports from Damaturu, capital of the Nigerian state of Yobe, indicate that the intent of the attack was specifically designed to target and kill Christian residents of the city. Of the nearly 150 people killed, at least 130 of were reported to be Christian.

According to Idris Garba, chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Yobe State, the Boko Haram assault was a “direct attack against Christians. If you said you were a Christian, they killed you. They were selective. They attacked 11 churches. They didn’t attack any mosques.”

Not surprisingly, the brutal assault has caused a near exodus of Christians from Damaturu, leaving Boko Haram to claim the city as its new headquarters.

While Boko Haram’s reign of terror through suicide bombings and targeted assassinations has produced over 400 deaths in 2011, most of the targeted victims have been Nigerian Christians, including nearly100 who were killed over the summer.

In fact, the attack on Damaturu had been preceded earlier in the week by Boko Haram members opening fire on a church in Nigeria’s Kaduna state, killing two Christians and critically wounding 11 others.

Of course, killing Christians in Nigeria should engender little surprise given that since 1999 when Sharia law was imposed in 12 northern Nigerian states and parts of four others, Nigeria has been witness to the death of thousands of Nigerian Christians and the destruction of nearly one thousand churches.

In 2010 alone, an estimated 2,000 Christians were killed in clashes with Muslim extremists, with hundreds of churches burnt to the ground. During that time over 500 Christians were reportedly killed in brutal clashes with Muslims in the city of Jos in central Nigeria’s Plateau state

That level of violence against Christians has, unfortunately, seeped over into 2011. In January, 35 Christians were killed in clashes with Muslims in the central Nigerian state of Bauchi; in February Jos was witness to 24 Christians killed in targeted attacks; and in May Muslims ambushed and killed 17 Christians in Bauchi state.

In April 2011, the presidential election of Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from Nigeria’s predominantly Christian south, triggered a series of Muslim rampages which caused the death of 100 Christians and the burning of more than 40 churches.

So it came as little surprise then that the brutal attack in Damaturu prompted Nigerian Christians to urge the Nigerian president to declare a state of emergency in the northeastern states of Yobe and Borno, scenes of some of the most viscous assaults against Christians.

While President Jonathan responded to the attacks in Damaturu by saying he had “directed security agencies to ensure the arrest of perpetrators of these heinous acts,” his resolve seemed to have little effect on Boko Haram.

Shortly after Jonathan’s statement, Boko Haram spokesman Abul-Qaqa stated, “More attacks are on the way.” Boko Haram Imam, Abubakar Shekau, followed up that declaration by telling his followers that the terror group needed to increase the violence, saying “Whomever we kill, we kill because Allah says we should kill and we kill for a reason.”

The Canadian Evangelical Left has blocked former President George W. Bush from speaking at evangelical Tyndale University in Toronto, deriding him as a virtual war criminal.

An online petition by faculty and students, fueled by reporting by the Toronto Star, evidently ensured the event’s cancellation last month.  One Tyndale professor, in his own anti-Bush op-ed, implicitly accused the former president of “blasphemy” and “heresy’ for daring to have employed scriptural language in citations of dreaded American exceptionalism during his administration.

“As no one has been convicted, I do not label anyone a war criminal,” disingenuously wrote Professor Arthur Paul Boers through clenched teeth.  “Yet George W. Bush ought to be investigated and held to account for: wrongful abduction and imprisonment without trial; employment of torture; tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq (conservative estimates total 100,000); other civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan; invading Iraq on mistaken if not fraudulently deceptive grounds; gross human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; and greater instability around the globe.”

Having himself lived in the U.S. shortly after 9-11, Professor Boers experienced first –hand America’s “fear and hatred” that was “couched in Christian terms” under Bush. The poor professor even toned down his Canadian accent, apparently lest all the American hate turn against him.  It’s likelier that nobody minded his accent but quite a few Americans were offended by his snotty tone towards their country, if his op-ed is any example.

“I saw during the Bush years in the U.S. that most Christians chose to remain silent in the face of pretty serious abuses of power and distortions of faith,” Boers afterwards told The Huffington Post.  “For me silence is not an option.”

But Boers’ snottiness evidently is not isolated at Tyndale.  A petition demanded a “full apology” from the university’s president, who admitted Bush is a “lightning rod figure,” for the effrontery in having invited Bush. The petitioners intemperately indignantly explained:  “We believe that no amount of new money can justify profiting from a former figurehead whose policies led to the murder of thousands of innocent civilians while invoking the name of Jesus.”

The Bush event was not even to have been on campus but at the Toronto Hilton and sponsored by a billionaire patron of the school.   Apparently Bush went ahead and spoke at another event, at the same hotel, sponsored by the same billionaire, and attended by some school employees. But Tyndale University College and Seminary itself seemingly was preserved from direct tarnish by the angel of death from America.

Christians throughout the Middle East are being persecuted by increasingly intolerant Muslim majorities, while Muslims in “Christian” Europe and North America have been empowered to demand ever more privileges.

The New American reported on March 28, 2011 that

Muslim Protesters, some of them women clad in black burqas, marched in London last week to demand Sharia law for the United Kingdom…The protesters carried signs with disturbing anti-American and anti-European messages. “Islam the solution for mankind,” one said, while another proclaimed that “Democracy will bring oppression.” Another called the United States, Britain, and France a “Trinity of evil,” while a fourth warned that “Sharia will dominate the world.”

Neither Western powers nor the Vatican have taken any actions to redress the dangerous situation faced by their Middle Eastern co-religionists. One cannot name a single Western “Christian” leader that has threatened the Muslim leader of Egypt with any form of retaliation, including the imposition of restrictions on Muslims living in Europe and America. In fact, President Obama invoked moral equivalency between the government-approved Egyptian Muslim killers and the Christian victims when he stated on October 10, 2011, “Now is a time for restraint on all sides so that Egyptians can move forward together to forge a strong and united Egypt.”

The absence of vociferous Western intervention on behalf of the persecuted Christians in Egypt, for example, has led to the brazen behavior of the Egyptian military regime, which resulted in the murder of 35 Christian demonstrators and the injuring of over 300 on Sunday, October 9, 2011.

The Coptic church of Egypt lambasted the nation’s military authorities on Monday, October 10, 2011, for having allowed repeated attacks on Christians with impunity, when most of the Christians were simply trying to stage a peaceful protest over the attack on their church. The spiritual leader of the Coptic Christian minority, Pope Shenouda III, who presided over funerals for some of the murder victims, declared three days of mourning, praying and fasting beginning on Tuesday. The preceding Sunday’s sectarian violence in Egypt was the worst since the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak in February.

Gruesome pictures that showed members of the Egyptian army and policemen in vehicles firing at the peaceful Christian demonstrators with live ammunition, attests to the intentional brutality of the regime.  These attacks served to appease the Islamist masses by allowing the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt to become the scapegoats for their rage.

Ihab Aziz, a Coptic-American activist, described the Sunday events that preceded the massacre saying, “The procession started at the Christian populated district of Shubra and went to Maspero, in front of the TV building, on the river Nile. On their way some Muslims fired live ammunition over their heads to terrorize them and some bricks were hurled at them. By the time they arrived to Maspero there were nearly 150,000 protesters. The army and police were waiting about 200 meters away from the Maspero TV building and they started firing at us. Two army armored vehicles came at great speed and drove into the crowds, going backwards and forwards, mowing people under their wheels.” Aziz said that he saw at least 20 dead Copts around him.

Muslims have been persecuting Christians ever since the time of Muhammed.  But in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring,” such activity seems to be on the rise throughout much of the Islamic world, now that Muslims in several countries are enjoying greater freedom to do things they felt more restrained from doing before.  Christians are being beaten and murdered, churches attacked and destroyed.

If there is a positive side of this terrible development, it is this: if there’s more such persecution going on, more attention is finally being paid to it in the mainstream Western media.  Yet even as some of the media are daring to report on these events, there remains a strong disinclination to suggest that this pattern of persecution has anything whatsoever to do with Islam.

Last Thursday, USA Today ran an op-ed which did a splendid job of presenting the persecution of Christians as un-Islamic.  The author of the op-ed, a Muslim named Qasim Rashid, chided his coreligionists for persecuting Christians, and quoted the Prophet Muhammed against them: “Christians are my citizens, and by God, I hold out against anything that displeases them.”  And: “We defend Christians. … No Muslim is to disobey this covenant until the Last Day.”

Rashid went on to catalog various horrendous punishments that have recently been meted out in Muslim countries to Christians, blasphemers, apostates, and so on.  In response to these acts, Rashid insisted that all of them were at odds with the dictates of Islam, because, he insisted, “the Quran commands Muslims to protect churches from attack,” “Islam requires equal rights and protection for minorities,” “the Quran forbids punishment for blasphemy,” “the Quran forbids punishment for apostasy,” “Islam does not sanction the mixing of mosque and state,” “the Quran protects the rights of women and children, condemns rape, forbids inheriting women (let alone children) against their will, and forbids compulsion in religion,” and “Islam demands absolute justice in all affairs.”  Islam, in short, is not the problem – it is the solution.

To be sure, Rashid is an Ahmadi Muslim – a member of a sect that really does believe in all these good things.  Describing the Ahmadi movement as being “at the forefront of taking Islam back from the corruption of such ‘Muslim’ nations” as Pakistan and Iran, he explains that “Ahmadi Muslims believe in absolute justice, reject religious compulsion, are loyal to their nations of residence, uphold the absolute sanctity and equality of human life, believe in gender equity and spiritual equality, condemn religious aggression, and champion universal religious freedom.”  Rashid identifies these as Islam’s “founding principles.”

Alas, Ahmadi Muslims represent a tiny minority of Muslims around the world.  Other Muslims do not even consider them Muslims, and in many Islamic countries they are persecuted and punished for identifying themselves as members of the Muslim faith.  While Ahmadis, moreover, consider these “nice” passages from the Koran to be at the center of their faith, mainstream Muslim theologians overwhelmingly disagree.  For them, it is not just the Koran but also the Hadith, or sayings of Muhammed, that are legitimate sources of Islamic law.  Also, there’s the question of which parts of the Koran you prioritize over the others.  Like those who prefer Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier movies, Ahmadi Muslims tend to stress the older, more humane portions of the Koran, while virtually all other Muslims consider those benign passages to have been abrogated by the more violent and intolerant material that came along later.

Religious violence against Christians and complaints against the ruling military council make up most headlines one reads about Egypt today. But the Nile state’s biggest, and largely unknown, problem concerns how it is going to feed its millions of desperately poor and hungry people in a time of economic downturn and political turmoil. It is estimated that about 40 million Egyptians among an 82 million population now live below the poverty line.

Egypt is the biggest wheat importer in the world, but, frighteningly, may soon run out of funds to buy on international markets the necessary food to feed its impoverished masses. A story in the Financial Times last week states that the Central Bank of Egypt’s foreign currency reserves have dropped $10 billion, from $29.8 to $19.4, since last February.

“The current reserves are estimated to cover 4.8 months of imports, down from 6.9 in April, 2011,” the story goes on to say.

Which translates into only five months until catastrophe strikes. Egypt consumes 14 million tonnes of wheat annually, half of which it imports. The amount of wheat Egypt currently has in storage combined with planned purchases, primarily from Russia, is expected to last only until March.

While the recent massacre of Christians by the Egyptian army demonstrates that Egypt is disintegrating, the inability of the country’s rulers to feed their country’s millions of poor would lead to a collapse into chaos of monumental and cataclysmic proportions. The Asia Times columnist Spengler (a literary pseudonym), who has written about Egypt’s impending food crisis, believes it will not matter what form of government eventually takes charge in Egypt because the starvation issue will override all other concerns. As Spengler succinctly puts it: “Even Islamists have to eat.”

“It [Egypt] will look like the Latin America banana republics, but without the bananas,” Spengler states. “That is not meant in jest: few people actually starved to death in Latin inflations. Egypt, which imports half its wheat and a great deal of the rest of its food, will actually starve.”

Egypt’s food problem has been strongly affected by the continuing steep rise in world food prices. Corn and wheat, for example, have nearly doubled in price in the past year. Overall, food prices rose by 25 percent in 2010. Already last spring, the World Bank estimated that food costs for the world’s poor were reaching a “breaking point.” To make matters worse, prices have increased most dramatically on key commodities, such as rice, bread and cooking oil, the basic staples of people like those who make up Egypt’s huge underclass, rather than on processed foods.

“Food price increases will correspondingly roughly triple the inflationary impact in Egypt compared to Qatar,” reported the Arab paper, the Gulf Times. “In Egypt, the Consumer Price Index increased by 17.2 % in 2010 compared to 3.8 % in Qatar.”

The Arab street in Egypt has exploded twice in the past over food prices. The first time occurred in 1977 when the government of Anwar Sadat ended subsidies on basic commodities. Known as the “Bread Riots,” tens of thousands of people took to the streets in several Egyptian cities in what was called the greatest threat ever to military rule until Hosni Mubarak was deposed earlier this year. Eight hundred people perished in the 1977 disturbances until the subsidies were restored days later.

Egypt, for instance—which this year alone has seen nearly 80 Christians killed, their many churches burned or bombed, and their daughters kidnapped and forcibly converted—was not listed as a “country of particular concern,” this despite the fact that the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan federal government commission, had recommended that the State Department designate it so.

Neither was Pakistan cited as a “country of particular concern.”  According to CNS news, “Clinton did not designate Pakistan even though the State Department’s own report stated that Pakistani law calls for the death penalty for people who commit ‘blasphemy’ against Islam or who convert from Islam to another religion—and even though the report listed multiple instances of the Pakistani government using the law to persecute Christians.”

In fact, September alone saw the following in Pakistan:

Blasphemy

• A Christian student was expelled from school because she misspelled an Urdu word that, instead of praising, insulted Muhammad, leading to accusations of “blasphemy,” which carries the death penalty.  After the teacher beat her, the principal was notified and Muslims staged demonstrations “demanding registration of a criminal case against the eighth-grader and her eviction from the area.”  As riots and violence were about to erupt, the military intervened:  “They bundled the family in an ambulance and took them away…”
• “A Christian high school teacher has suffered false accusations of blasphemy by a student and some Muslim professors, because of dislike, revenge and hatred towards Christians. He was forced to leave his job and hide, he appealed to Court, but the laconic sentence of the judge of first instance invited him to ‘leave the country’…. Married and a father of three, he has been uprooted and is in hiding.”
• A 30-year-old Christian man accused of blasphemy and imprisoned, died in his cell from a treatable disease, “after officials denied him proper medical care.” While in prison, he and others “accused of blasphemy, were kept in solitary confinement without access to a toilet, water or electricity.”

Abuse of Christian Women

• A Christian mother of five was raped by two Muslim men, who “tend to assume they will not be prosecuted if their victims are Christians”; she and her family are being threatened with violence unless they drop the charges.
• A Christian nurse was raped by a Muslim colleague who filmed the act in an attempt to blackmail her into renouncing Christianity and marrying him:  “[he] raped me while his friend filmed the entire incident. They ruined my life completely.”
• Accordingly, a new report estimates that some 700 Christian girls annually are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and marry their Muslim abductors.

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

Attacks on Churches

Egypt: Muslims threatened Christians near Aswan for fixing a dilapidated church, even though it was authorized, demanding that the church not have a cross, dome, bells, or even be called a “church”; weeks later, after Friday prayers, thousands of Muslims attacked the church, burning it to the ground, and demolishing its domes, even as Egyptian security watched.  (Copts protesting this church attack led to the recent military massacre.)

Indonesia: A Muslim suicide bomber attacked a packed church killing himself and wounding at least 27 worshippers, some critically; security received advance warning but, as often happens in Muslim majority countries, left their post at the time of the attack.

Tunisia: Around 20 Muslims attempted to transform a Christian church into a mosque “in an ominous sign of the growing threat to the country’s small Church in the wake of the revolution.”  The police dispersed them, but “they have been invited to make an official request to the faith ministry” to transform the church into a mosque.

Apostasy

Indonesia: Under accusations of encouraging Muslims to apostatize to Christianity, an American family (husband and wife, two sons) were attacked by a Muslim throng that set fire to their property and vehicle. “Only the intervention of police saved the[ir] lives” from “an enraged mob spurred by a local religious leader.”

Iran: A Christian pastor remains incarcerated awaiting execution for refusing to recant Christianity; the government of Iran, under international criticism, now claims that he is getting the death penalty, not because of religion, but because he is a “Zionist,” a “rapist,” and other new charges, even though its own court documents clearly assert his crime is apostasy.

Somalia: A Muslim convert to Christianity was abducted and decapitated, his body dumped in the road, by Muslims from al-Shabaab, “a militant group with ties to al Qaeda” that has “vowed to rid Somalia of Christianity.”  According to a leader of the underground church: “It is usual for the al-Shabaab to decapitate those they suspect to have embraced the Christian faith, or sympathizers of western ideals.”

Sudan: 129 people in southern Sudan were arrested and charged with apostasy, which “carries a maximum sentence of death.” The plaintiff maintains that while the defendants may be familiar with the Quran, they are not upholding the “Sunna of Muhammad”:  “Given the track record of the Government of Sudan, it is possible that Article 126 [which criminalizes apostates] is being used to suppress ethnic minorities and those who the state perceives as potential sources of opposition.”

“Dhimmitude” (Abuse, Debasement, and Suppression of Christians)

Egypt: A 14-year-old Christian girl was prevented from entering school because she refused to wear a veil: “The school management described her as ‘flaunt’ for not covering her hair”….  Coptic students were forced to obey for fear of the school management’s threats” except the girl and her parents, who “refused this decision because it is inconsistent with religious freedom and a blatant Islamization of education.”

Iraq:  Three Christians were kidnapped; according to police sources, “Gunmen in a modern vehicle blocked the Christians’ way, set their white Landrover [car] on fire, killed their hunting dogs and led them to an unknown destination.”  This abduction comes “after several other anti-Christian attacks in recent weeks, including a car bomb that exploded in August near a church in central Kirkuk…”

Iran: Along with the aforementioned Christian pastor awaiting execution, five Christians, including a “heavily pregnant woman,” were ordered to “report to prison immediately to serve a one year prison sentence,” being convicted of “crimes against the Islamic Order.”  Also, an adopted child was confiscated from its Christian parents, as a way to pressure them to testify against fellow Christians: “If you want your child back, you must file a complaint against your fellow Christians in prison.”

Kazakhstan: “Lawmakers in Kazakhstan have voted for ‘controversial legislation’ that Christians and rights activists say will further limit religious freedom in the mainly Muslim Central Asian state.”  Among other things, the new law “makes[s] it more difficult for churches to worship freely” and bans “house churches.”

Philippines: In Mindanao, “the Christian minority is suffering harassment and pressure from the Muslim population. Government officials are forcing Christians to sell their land to make room for Chinese industries.  According to sources, the climate of impunity, the abductions, the continuing clashes between the army and extremist Islamic groups and the economic crisis have created an unbearable atmosphere for the Christian population, who are afraid to express their faith in public.”

Sudan: A Catholic priest was beaten for allegedly “preaching against Islamic government and opposing its teaching and rules.” Likewise, Muslims sent text messages to at least 10 church leaders in Khartoum saying they are planning to target Christian leaders, buildings, and institutions:  “We want this country to be purely an Islamic state, so we must kill the infidels and destroy their churches all over Sudan,” said one recent text message circulating in Khartoum.

Incitement against and Killings of Christians

Egypt: In a circulated video, the grand mufti of Al Azhar, Ali Goma’a, referred to Christians as “infidels”; Wagdi Ghoneim, a popular cleric and former U.S. imam, called Copts “Crusaders” on Al Jazeera, insisting that they do not deserve equal rights with Muslims in Egypt; Abu Shadi, a representative of the Salafis, told Tahrir News that the Copts must either convert to Islam, pay jizya and assume inferior status, or die.

Nigeria:  Over 100 Christians have been killed by Muslim militants, many hacked to death, and aided by the military; “among them was a pregnant woman who died with a child in her womb.”   Similarly, Muslim militants “went to shops owned by Christians at a market at about 8 p.m., ordering them to recite verses from the Quran.” If they were unable to recite, the gunmen shot and killed them.

Syria: An anti-Assad Muslim preacher urged Muslims through sermons televised in Syria to “tear apart, chop up and feed” the meat of Christians and others who support the regime “to the dogs.”

About this Series

Because the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world is endemic, on its way to reaching epidemic proportions, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed in order to collate some—by no means all—of the foulest instances of Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month. It serves two purposes:

1. Intrinsically, to document that which the mainstream media does not: habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.
2. Instrumentally, to show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is ultimately 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; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya; overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis (second-class citizens); and simple violence and murder. Oftentimes it is a combination thereof.

Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the west, to India in the east, and even throughout the West, wherever there are Muslims—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Sharia, or the supremacist culture born of it.

Previous Reports:

August, 2011

July, 2011

In this frustrated hope, of course, Contessa Brewer is not alone. She goes on to explain that she is worried about "bigotry." She doesn't say anything about calling the Muslim communities in the U.S. to account and demanding that they stop teaching jihad and hatred of Jews and Christians. For Contessa Brewer and her ilk, Muslims are always the victims, no matter how many people Islamic jihadists may murder.

(Thanks to Mackie.)

Try it yourself: go to Bing and type in "Jews are." One suggested completion of the phrase will show up:

Now type in "Christians are," and you'll get two suggestions:

But if you type in "Muslims are," you get no hint that they are evil, pumpkin-like, or stupid. You get nothing at all:

So once again possible negative suggestions are filtered out for the world's most thin-skinned and lethal religious believers -- the ones waging a global campaign against free speech about the aspects of their religion that incite and justify violence and supremacism. What a coincidence!

For more on Bing, see here.

(Thanks to Richard for the heads-up.)