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Pakistan: Christians Tortured At Hands of Police

May 11, 2016

Pakistan: Christians Tortured At Hands of Police, Clarion Project, May 11, 2016

Pakistan--Christian-Torutre-Police-IP

One of the Christian men being tortured by police taken by a relative who bribed his way into the police station.

Two Pakistani Christians men are both fighting for their lives after being tortured by police in Lahore. The two men, Faraz Masih, 30, and Doya Masih, 40, were arrested for allegedly committing a robbery, a crime which they deny.

Pakistan--Christian-Torutre-Police-Inside

Without being formally charged, the men were kept in police custody for days, hung upside down and brutally beaten. Family members were denied access to the prisoners. However, after offering a huge bribe to a junior police officer, one relative was allowed into the police station where he photographed the gruesome scene.

After sharing the photos with local crime reporters, the mainstream media picked up the story. Media attention on the case forced the police to transfer the near-unconscious men to a private clinic for medical attention.

In a strategy reported by locals to be typical in such cases (which are also reportedly very common), the privately-managed clinic was chosen by the police to avoid legal “complications.” If the police would have transferred the men to a public government hospital, their medical records could be used an evidence against the offending officers.

Although a senior police officer ordered a commission of inquiry to investigate the incident, locals say this is a common tactic used to deflect attention from the police and silence the media. It is not expected to bear any outcome.

Although Pakistani law disallows any corporal punishment while in custody and states that all those arrested for crimes must be brought to a court within 24 hours after their arrests, in this case, the police did not charge the men and, therefore, there is no official record of their arrest.

One relative reported that the police were demanding a huge bribe to release the men, who both come from poor families. “The police investigators applied third-degree torture methods during interrogation. They were demanding one hundred thousand rupees ($955) for the release of the suspects,” he told local media.

The sum, which represents more than a year’s salary for those living in poverty in Pakistan, was impossible for the families to pay. According to a survey by the Christian Monitor, most prisoners in Lahore’s prisons are Christians who cannot afford to pay the requisite bribe asked after every arrest.

Thousands in Pakistan have lost their lives through this state-sanctioned abuse that criminal suspects encounter at the hands of police and prison officials.

Categories: Islam and Christianity, Islam and cruelty, Islam and human rights, Islamic tolerance, Pakistan
Tags: Islam and Christianity, Islam and cruelty, Islam and human rights, Islamic tolerance, Pakistan

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“It Is My Dream to Behead Someone” — American Muslim

May 1, 2016

“It Is My Dream to Behead Someone” — American Muslim, Gatestone Institute, Raymond Ibrahim, May 1, 2016

♦ “Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are, like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just! The responsibility of a bishop is to teach, to use his influence to transmit truth.” — Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, Syria.

♦ Federal authorities arrested Khalil Abu-Rayyan of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, an ISIS supporter who had planned to carry out an attack on a 6,000-member Detroit church. Abu-Rayyan allegedly had guns and a large knife, and told an undercover FBI agent that he “tried to shoot up a church one day … If I can’t do jihad in the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here. … It is my dream to behead someone.”

♦ n Pakistan, a disabled Christian man sentenced to death for blasphemy said that he was forced into admitting to the charges in order to stop his wife from being tortured… Emmanuel and his wife were found guilty of insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in text messages to a local imam in 2013, and sentenced to death. The conviction came despite the fact that the poor Christian couple are illiterate.

As opposed to their Western counterparts, Christian leaders who live in the Middle East continued expressing their frustration at the West’s indifference and worse. Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, during an interview, asked “Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are, like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just! The responsibility of a bishop is to teach, to use his influence to transmit truth. Why are your bishops afraid of speaking? Of course they would be criticized, but that would give them a chance to defend themselves, and to defend this truth. You must remember that silence often means consent.”

The archbishop also criticized the migration policies of Western countries: “The egoism and the interests slavishly defended by your governments will in the end kill you as well. Open your eyes, didn’t you see what happened recently in Paris?”

Similarly, in Iraq, Christian representatives invited to participate in the “Conference on the Protection of Peaceful Coexistence” — the sort of conference that would be heavily attended, praised, and cited by Christians in the West — boycotted the event on the grounds that such government-sponsored events are purely for show and nothing comes of them. “What need is there in participating in meetings like this and repeating the formulas that give the title to the conference if then one does not see initiatives and changes in concrete terms?” said Chaldean Patriarch Raphael Louis I. Other non-Muslim religious minorities, including the Yazidis and Mandaeans, also boycotted the conference.

The Chaldean Patriarch went on to launch an appeal to government authorities and political and religious leaders to denounce the continuing legal discrimination and sectarian bullying suffered by Christians: “We met with government officials, and paid a visit to some of the Islamic religious authorities to talk about what we have in common, with regards to our faiths and the life we share in this land. During these meetings, we assured our loyalty to Iraq, which is our country, and we do not seek revenge, we want to live in peace with all Iraqis. Unfortunately, none of their promises has become reality.”

January’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Muslim Persecution of Christian Churches

USA: Federal authorities arrested a Michigan man believed to be an ISIS supporter who had planned to carry out an attack on a 6,000-member Detroit church. Khalil Abu-Rayyan, 21, of Dearborn Heights, allegedly had guns and a large knife, and told an undercover FBI agent that he “tried to shoot up a church one day.” “I bought a bunch of bullets. I practiced reloading and unloading,” he said in an online conversation. Investigators did not specify which church Abu-Rayyan was eyeing, but said it has a capacity of 6,000 members. In conversations with an undercover agent, he said, “If I can’t do jihad in the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here.” He also had armed himself with a knife and told the undercover agent, “It is my dream to behead someone.”

Bangladesh: Catholic nuns were attacked on two separate occasions. In the early morning hours of February 7, around 15 masked, armed men broke into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, and its adjacent Catechist Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent, in Chuadanga. They vandalized the convent’s chapel, desecrated the Eucharist, slapped a nun around, and looted over $8,000 as well as other valuables. A few days later in Tumilia, 12 men broke into St. Mary’s Catholic Mother Care Center, a hospital clinic founded in 1933, and stole some items. “They broke down the door of my room,” said Sister Mary, “and were armed. They threatened me and asked where I held the money. I had no other choice, I gave them all the cash we had.” According to Theophil Nokrek, secretary of the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace, the two recent attacks “are not isolated incidents. Some groups are trying to harm our Christian community. They are doing so with premeditated actions. The government should protect us adequately.” He added that a few days earlier in the same district a Christian micro-credit bank was also robbed.

Kosovo: Four ethnic Albanians were arrested near the Serbian Orthodox monastery, Visoki Decani, a UNESCO world heritage site. Two of the suspects wore beards and were dressed in Salafi garb. A Kalashnikov rifle with ammunition and a pistol, as well as some extremist jihadi books, were found in their car. One of the suspects was later found to have an ISIS flag in his house. More than a year earlier, in October 2014, ISIS graffiti was sprayed on buildings belonging to the monastery. Even so, Kosovo police said the four men had no intention to attack the monastery and had no links to terrorism; Albanian media accused the monastery of exaggerating the threat. One month earlier, Muslims had urinated in an Orthodox Christian church in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.

Turkey: On February 18, authorities ordered four Christian congregations to vacate the church building they shared. The Christians were given until February 26 to comply—eight days. Built in the 1880s, the building, which accommodated as many as 200 people, had, since 2004, been shared by four different Christian denominations for their Sunday worship. Due to protests against the decision, on February 23 authorities withdrew the order. Discussing this incident, Turkish academic Aykan Erdemir said, “Christians do not have any legal entitlement to the building. They only have usage rights for the time being, which I think is a very precarious situation …. Members of non-majority religions have to depend on the goodwill of bureaucrats and the majority population.”

Muslim Violence Against and Slaughter of Christians

United States: Police shot and killed a Muslim man of Somali background after he attacked several people with a machete at Nazareth Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. The restaurant is owned by a pro-Israel Arab Christian. Thirty-year-old Mohamed Barry walked into the restaurant, had a conversation with an employee and then left. He returned a half hour later, went up to a man and a woman who were sitting at a booth just inside the door, and started slashing. Four people were injured. Law enforcement said the man had traveled to the Middle East in 2012 and that the incident appears to be the type of “lone wolf terrorist attacks they’re trying to stop.” Even so, Columbus police Sgt. Rich Weiner said, “right now there’s nothing that leads us to believe that this is anything but a random attack.”

Recalling the incident, a waitress said, “He looked straight at me, but he went over to the booths and just started going down the booths. It all seemed to happen in slow motion.”

Karen Bass, another eyewitness, said, “He came to each table and just started hitting them. There were tables and chairs overturned there was a man on the floor bleeding there was blood on the floor. I fell like five times. My legs felt like jelly. I just thought he was going to come behind me and slash me up.” After the attacks, Barry fled in his car but was chased by police and cornered. With a knife in one hand and a machete in the other, Barry got out of his car and lunged across the hood at the officers before he was shot dead.

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In Columbus, Ohio, Mohamed Barry, a Muslim man of Somali background, attacked several people with a machete at Nazareth Restaurant — a business owned by a pro-Israel Arab Christian. Police later shot and killed Barry when he lunged at them with a machete and knife.

Kenya: In a pre-dawn raid on a predominantly Christian area, the Somalia-based Islamic jihadi group, Al Shabaab, killed at least four Christians, one of whom was beheaded. According to a Christian who was shot in his hand but survived, there were five or six heavily-armed assailants speaking Somali and dressed in military uniforms. They shot two Christians dead, hacked and beheaded another and killed yet another by setting his house on fire. “I could not understand them, so they shot me in my hand, but I managed to escape while a neighbor who was with me was beheaded by the other attackers…. As I fled for my life, bleeding, I could see two houses burning. Those who were attacked are Christians. I am very sure that the attackers were looking for Christians… This is the third time the area has been attacked, and we have lost several Christians.”

Egypt: Another young Coptic Christian conscript allegedly committed suicide in his unit in Menufia. According to Maj. Gen. Muhammad Mas’ud, the 20-year-old, known only as Michael, “shot a bullet from his firearm into his chest, dying instantly.” He supposedly killed himself “after receiving a phone call from his home,” said Mas’ud. Lawyer Hani Ramses remarked that “It’s new for us constantly to hear about Coptic recruits killing themselves in the military and police stations. It’s especially strange that it’s happening now, and not previously, when Egypt was often in a state of war and under constant threat… The killing of Coptic conscripts in the military has become a [new] phenomenon.” (Read here for several more accounts of Coptic Christians being killed in their military units under “mysterious circumstances,” such as supposed suicide.) The lawyer also wondered if these deaths indicate that “extremist groups” have infiltrated the Egyptian military.

Muslim Attacks on Christian Freedom: No to Apostasy and Blasphemy

Italy: A report said that more than one thousand Muslim converts to Christianity currently living in Italy are hiding their conversions for fear of violent retaliation from the Muslim community.

One of them, a 55-year-old Egyptian chemical engineer who now works a waiter, said he had been a fervent Muslim who was converted to Christianity and baptized in Italy after the death of his mother three years ago. The man, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution from Muslims, stated that the decisive element in his conversion came from seeing Christians with “a humanity more complete than mine.” He openly expressed his frustration about having to hide his newfound faith. “I cannot openly practice my Christian faith. I am afraid that some fanatical Muslim may do harm not only to me, but especially to relatives who remained in Egypt…. How is it that Italians who convert to Islam can go on TV and talk about it, and instead I have to hide to avoid retaliation?”

Uganda: A Muslim imam known as “the malaria of Christianity” was arrested in connection with the killing of a 28-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity. Laurence Maiso’s body was found on January 27 at his own house, his head in a pool of blood. Four days earlier, Imam Kamulali Hussein had met his wife and him on a local road. According to Maiso’s wife, the imam told him, “You have refused to join us. Do you know that Allah does not want us to have a kafir [infidel] neighbor? And you should know that Allah is about to send to you the Angel of Death in your house. Please prepare to meet him at any time.” Four days after this warning, Maiso’s wife went out of the home and returned to find her husband dead on the floor. A neighbor said that on the day of the murder she saw eight men—including Imam Hussein—coming out of Maiso’s house. On several earlier occasions other Muslims had confronted Maiso and demanded that he recant his Christian faith. The killing is the latest in a series of attacks on Christians. On December 23, 2015, a pastor was hacked to death as he and other church members resisted an effort by Muslims to take over their land. And less than a week earlier, five underground Christians, including a pregnant mother, in a predominantly Muslim village, died from a pesticide put into their food after a Bible study.

Pakistan: A disabled Christian man sentenced to death for blasphemy said that he was forced into admitting to the charges in order to stop his wife from being tortured: “There is no man who can stand to see his wife being tortured by police, so to save my wife, I confessed,” Shafqat Emmanuel said in his appeal. Emmanuel and his wife were found guilty of insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in text messages to a local imam in 2013, and sentenced to death. The conviction came despite the fact that the poor Christian couple are illiterate, witnesses are offering contradicting testimonies against them, and evidence that the blasphemous text messages could not have been sent by from the phone of the Christians.

Kenya: A Christian of Somali descent was last reported unable to see or eat after Muslim relatives beat him unconscious on his way to church service, Sunday, February 7, outside Nairobi. Relatives told 26-year-old Hassan that they ambushed him because they had learned that he and others were holding mid-week Christian devotional times in their home. “They hit me with a blunt object, and I fell down bleeding. Then they stepped on my stomach, and while I was struggling, another hit me on my head [with the blunt object]. I was not able to know what happened after that point. I just woke up to find my mother screaming for help.”

One of the assailants had told Hassan, “You have been deceiving us that you have been having a ‘family meeting’ – we have found out that you have been conducting Christian activities, which is against our family tradition of being a Muslim family.” Hassan declined to name the relatives, saying he feared they would kill him. Somalis generally believe all Somalis are Muslims by birth and that consequently any Somali who becomes a Christian can be charged with apostasy, but Hassan was raised Christian from childhood.

Dhimmitude

United States: The Principal of the Bruce Vento Elementary School in St. Paul, Minnesota, Scott Masini, banned the celebration of Valentine’s Day, a move that accords with Islamic teaching. As St. Valentine’s Day has its origins in the Christian religion, it is banned throughout the Muslim world. In a letter to parents, Masini said that, “my personal feeling is we need to find a way to honor and engage in holidays that are inclusive of our student population.” He went on to explain that the holiday was cancelled as it violates some students’ religious beliefs: “I have come to the difficult decision to discontinue the celebration of the dominant holidays until we can come to a better understanding of how the dominant view will suppress someone else’s view.” He added that the school would also no longer celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, as celebrating those holidays “is encroaching on the educational opportunities of others and threatening the culture of tolerance and respect for all.” Several parents were unhappy with the decision. One parent on the school’s Facebook page wrote, “Very sad. All the fun is gone.” Another wrote, “Tired of the PC. Totally ridiculous.”

Germany: All throughout asylum centers, Muslim migrants are tearing up Bibles, assaulting Christians, sexually abusing women and children, and beating up homosexuals, reported the German newspaper, Die Welt. Yazidi girls who were formerly used as sex slaves by the Islamic State are housed in secret locations in Germany, in order not to attract unwanted attention from migrants sympathetic to the Islamic State or Muslims who view them as nothing more than sexual objects. More than a thousand of these women live in various special shelters across Germany.

Malaysia: Catholic school pupils are being pressured to convert to Islam, according to Sister Rita Chew, president of the Educational Commission of the Archdiocese of Kota Kinabalu. She partially attributed this new pressure to increasingly aggressive Muslims in schools run by the Church: “Some people seem very interested in bringing forward Muslim programs in our elementary schools.” Local sources said that Islamic proselytism activities take place in all schools of the country—including Catholic and Christian institutions. Several episodes also show a widespread prejudice against non-Muslim students, noted the sister, adding “Our fear comes from the fact that conversions take place, but the government denies this fact. Some Christian parents have found that their children are taught Islamic prayers.”

Egypt: For the second time, Mervat Seifein, a Christian school teacher, was rejected by students in her school in Minya, Upper Egypt, simply for being Christian. On February 8, Seifein was promoted to school director of Beni Mazar Secondary Girls’ School. It was a routine promotion in which she replaced the previous school director, a Muslim. But students—joined by some teachers—protested and held a sit-in in the school courtyard demanding her removal. “We don’t want a Copt,” they shouted. Police were not able to disband the boys’ demonstration in the school courtyard. Seifein said “The girls who demonstrated against me don’t know me, so why the antagonism? Simply because I am Coptic [Christian]? The only explanation I can fathom is there has been fanatic incitement going on against my promotion, possibly by persons who are purely extremist or who have an interest in keeping me out of that post.” This is not the first such incident. According to Ezzat Ibrahim, a Minya activist who demanded that a prompt official investigation be conducted,

“This is flagrant religious discrimination. It brings to mind the incident in the southern province of Qena when the Islamists rose against the appointment of a Coptic governor in the past-Arab Spring weeks in 2011, and the State gave in and went back on the appointment. It is catastrophic that some 50 or 100 teenage girls or boys should impose their will on the State. And it is equally disastrous that these students were pushed to do so by a group of fanatic Islamists. The positive official response to their preposterous demands amounts to an invitation for religious discrimination. The deputy minister who did that must be dismissed.”

Separately, more than 150 Coptic Christians staged a sit-in protest at the provincial administration office in Minya, to spread awareness for the continued kidnappings of Christians across the country. The protest specifically highlighted the case of an 18-year-old Christian girl who was kidnapped a few days earlier. “Kidnappings that target Christians remain a scourge for the Coptic community in many areas of Egypt. Already several appeals have been launched by Christian organizations to Egyptian authorities, including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to take so that adequate measures are taken to combat this phenomenon,” added the report. Several kidnappings have ended in the murder of the hostages.

Pakistan: Tahira, 21, and Reema Bibi, 20, two Christian women, were abducted last December from near their home in Sargodha (Punjab) while walking together from work. Two Muslim men apparently seized the two women, raped them and then forcibly married them. Afterwards, they kept them segregated in their Islamabad home. On February 11, Tahira managed to escape. Her Muslim “husband,” however, filed a complaint with police, who immediately arrested six members of her Christian family. The relatives were released thanks to pressure from human rights groups, but the authorities have ordered the family to return Tahira to her kidnapper-rapist-husband. According to human rights activists, these are common experiences for Christian girls and their families in Pakistan. Even if a case goes to court, the victims are always threatened and pressured by their “husbands” to declare that their conversion was voluntary. Victims are often sexually abused, forced into prostitution, and suffer domestic abuse or even wind up as victims of human trafficking. Those who try to rebel are told that they “are now Muslims and that the punishment for apostasy is death,” noted the report.

Separately, a man refused to renounce Christ, despite being tortured by Muslim co-workers who tried to convert him to Islam. Patras Hanif, a construction worker and father of five, said he was targeted because of his Christian faith. His co-workers tried to pressure him into converting, even threatening false blasphemy charges. “They very often called me ‘kafir,’ which means unfaithful [“infidel”], and they threatened me that they would resort to false accusations of blasphemy if I refused to convert to Islam. A blasphemy charge in Pakistan is very serious and usually results in the death penalty,” noted Hanif.

According to Hanif’s lawyer, “This is the suffering Christians in Pakistan go through. Islamic extremist groups would like to eliminate Christianity and other religions.”

Jordan: Official school curricula intentionally omit and distort Christian history in the region. This came out in Amman, during a conference entitled, “Toward a Complete Strategy to Combat Extremism,” hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Political Studies. Dr. Hena al-Kaldani, a Christian, said that “there is a complete cancelation of Arab Christian history in the pre-Islamic era” and “many historical mistakes” in the school curriculums of Jordan. Al-Kaldani asserted that “there are unjustifiable historic leaps in our Jordanian curriculum,” meaning that centuries’ worth of Christian history is bypassed or suppressed. He said that, for example, “10th grade textbooks omit any mention of any Christian or church history in the region.”

Textbooks completely ignore historic Christian figures of importance and make no mention of Jerusalem’s Christian sites, while giving detailed accounts about Islamic sites, he added. That the original inhabitants of Petra, the Nabateans, were once pagans who converted to Christianity is also omitted. Wherever Christianity is mentioned, omissions and mischaracterizations proliferate. One Arabic language textbook uses the phrase, “Man shall not live by bread alone” without attributing it to Christ or the Bible. Christianity is primarily mentioned as a Western (that is, “foreign”) source of colonization, said al-Kaldani.

About this Series

While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by Muslims is growing. The report entitled “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some — though by no means all — of the instances of the Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month.

It documents what the mainstream media often fails to report.

It posits that such Muslim persecution is not random but rather systematic, and takes place in all languages, ethnicities, and locations.

Categories: Islam and Christianity, Islam and human rights, Islam and women, Islamic indoctrination of children, Islamisation
Tags: Islam and Christianity, Islam and human rights, Islam and women, Islamic indoctrination of children, Islamisation

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Report: Child-Rape on the Rise Among Syrian Migrants in Greece, Europe

April 27, 2016

Report: Child-Rape on the Rise Among Syrian Migrants in Greece, Europe, Truth Revolt, Tiffany Gabbay, April 27, 2016

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Tell us again, Obama, about the new three-month vetting process.

Syrian migrants have been wreaking havoc in migrant camps and their surrounding neighborhoods all across the Eurozone. Reports of riots, looting, burning, assault and battery, molestation and worst of all child-rape, abound.

In fact, the latter scourge is reportedly on the rise in Greek migrant camps, according to Breitbart:

Greek authorities are investigating after numerous reports of extreme violence and sex assault among the migrants living in the shanty town established among the abandoned former Athens International Airport. […]

The initial arrival of the young men means they have had time to establish themselves in the new camps. A report by The Times quotes an Afghan father of five who said of the new camps: “It’s like the Wild West there… I’m not going back. Neither are my children”.

Relocations started after a 17-year-old Afghan boy was stabbed to death in Athens, where both the victim and attacker were Ellinikon residents, but reports from the inside of the camp suggest a sinister web of child rape where fear rules. […]

In Greece, girls as young as five have been abused by Afghan males, while in countries like Austria, Germany, and Sweden, child rape in swimming pools has become a regular feature in national news.

One Afghan mother told the Times she sleep close to her children after witnessing child-rape at her Greek encampment.

“Weird things happen here after midnight,” she explained. “Many of the young men get drunk. They shout, fight and do ugly things. No one dares to confront them. We’ve seen young girls and boys raped in the bathrooms here.”

One of the primary issues is the types of people housed at the refugee camps — many of whom are able-bodied, Muslim men. Members of the Christian community — the one actually targeted for genocide — aren’t found at the migrant camps for the very reasons stated above. Christians are targeted across the Middle East and know the refugee camps are as hostile a place for them as the country they’re fleeing.

Without proper vetting, as asylum applicants are processed across the West, the scourge of rape and mayhem will only spread outward. And, in case you missed it, the bill of goods Americans were sold on an 18-24 month vetting process for refugees was, predictably a lie.The actual vetting time has been reduced to three months, if that. What’s more, only a paltry 2.5 percent of our current Syrian refugee population are Christian.

Once again, Western leaders have utterly failed their own citizens, along with the very refugees they claim to be helping.

Categories: Islam and Christianity, Islamic invasion, Islamic perversions, Islamisation, Syrian refugees
Tags: Islam and Christianity, Islamic invasion, Islamic perversions, Islamisation, Syrian refugees

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How Islam Erased Christianity from History

April 26, 2016

How Islam Erased Christianity from History, Front Page Magazine, Raymond Ibrahim, April 26, 2016

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Originally published by PJ Media.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

While Christianity continues to be physically erased from the Middle East, lesser known is that its historical role and presence is also being expunged from memory.

Last month a video emerged showing Islamic State members tossing hundreds of Christian textbooks, many of them emblazoned with crosses, into a large bonfire. As one report put it, ISIS was “burning Christian textbooks in an attempt to erase all traces of” Christianity from the ancient region of Mosul, where Christianity once thrived for centuries before the rise of Islam.

As usual, ISIS is ultimately an extreme example of Islam’s normative approach. This was confirmed during a recent conference in Amman, Jordan hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Political Studies. While presenting, Dr. Hena al-Kaldani, a Christian, said that “there is a complete cancelation of Arab Christian history in the pre-Islamic era,” “many historical mistakes,” and “unjustifiable historic leaps in our Jordanian curriculum.” “Tenth grade textbooks omit any mention of any Christian or church history in the region.” Wherever Christianity is mentioned, omissions and mischaracterizations proliferate, including the portrayal of Christianity as a Western (that is, “foreign”) source of colonization, said al-Kaldani.

Of course, Christian minorities throughout the Middle East—not just in Jordan—have long maintained that the history taught in public classrooms habitually suppresses the region’s Christian heritage while magnifying (including by lying about) Islam.

“It sounds absurd, but Muslims more or less know nothing about Christians, even though they make up a large part of the population and are in fact the original Egyptians,” said Kamal Mougheeth, a retired teacher in Egypt: “Egypt was Christian for six or seven centuries [before the Muslim invasion around 640]. The sad thing is that for many years the history books skipped from Cleopatra to the Muslim conquest of Egypt. The Christian era was gone. Disappeared. An enormous black whole.”[i]

This agrees perfectly with what I recall my parents, Christians from Egypt, telling me of their classroom experiences from more than half a century ago: there was virtually no mention of Hellenism, Christianity, or the Coptic Church—one thousand years of Egypt’s pre-Islamic history. History began with the pharaohs before jumping to the seventh century when Arabian Muslims “opened” Egypt to Islam. (Wherever Muslims conquer non-Muslim territories, Islamic hagiography euphemistically refers to it as an “opening,” fath, never a “conquest.”)

Sharara Yousif Zara, an influential politician involved in the Iraqi Ministry of Education agrees: “It’s the same situation in Iraq. There’s almost nothing about us [Christians] in our history books, and what there is, is totally wrong. There’s nothing about us being here before Islam. The only Christians mentioned are from the West. Many Iraqis believe we moved here. From the West. That we are guests in this country.”[ii]

Zara might be surprised to learn that similar ignorance and historical revisionism predominates in the West. Although Christians are in fact the most indigenous inhabitants of most of the Arab world, I am often asked, by educated people, why Christians “choose” to go and live in the Middle East among Muslims, if the latter treat them badly.

At any rate, the Mideast’s pseudo historical approach to Christianity has for generations successfully indoctrinated Muslim students to suspect and hate Christianity, which is regularly seen as a non-organic parasitic remnant left by Western colonialists (though as mentioned, Christianity precedes Islam in the region by some six centuries).

This also explains one of Islam’s bitterest ironies: a great many of today’s Middle East Christians are being persecuted by Muslims — including of the ISIS variety — whose own ancestors were persecuted Christians who converted to Islam to end their suffering. In other words, Muslim descendants of persecuted Christians are today slaughtering their Christian cousins. Christians are seen as “foreign traitors” in part because many Muslims do not know of their own Christian ancestry.

Due to such entrenched revisionism, Muslim “scholars” are also able to disseminate highly dubious and ahistorical theses, as seen in Dr. Fadel Soliman’s 2011 book, Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad. It claims that, at the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the vast majority of Egyptians were not, as Muslim and Western history has long taught, Christians, but rather prototypical Muslims, or muwahidin, who were being oppressed by European Christians: hence, the Islamic invasion of Egypt was really about “liberating” fellow Muslims.

Needless to say, no historian has ever suggested that Muslims invaded Egypt to liberate “proto-Muslims.” Rather, the Muslim chroniclers who wrote our primary sources on Islam, candidly and refreshingly present the “openings” as they were—conquests, replete with massacres, enslavement, and displacement of Christians and the destruction of thousands of churches.

In the end, of course, the Muslim world’s historical approach to Christianity should be familiar. After all, doesn’t the West engage in the same chicanery? In both instances, Christianity is demonized and its history distorted by its usurping enemies: in the West, by a host of “isms”—including leftism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism—and in the Middle East, by Islam.

Notes:

[i] Quote from The Last Supper: The Plight of Christians in Arab Lands by Klaus Wivel.

[ii] Ibid.

Categories: History, Islam and Christianity
Tags: History, Islam and Christianity

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Lebanon, Christians, Under Islamist Threat

April 24, 2016

Lebanon, Christians, Under Islamist Threat, Gatestone Institute, Shadi Khalloul, April 24, 2016

♦ Islamic jihadist groups are threatening Lebanese Christians and demanding that they submit to Islam. Lebanon’s Christians, descendants of Aramaic Syriacs, were the majority in the country a mere 100 years ago.

♦ aad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim politician supported by Saudi Arabia, has invited every Lebanese party to his office to sign a document confirming that Lebanon is an Arab state. This is clearly intended to turn Lebanon into yet another officially Arab Muslim state.

♦ The next step will be to ask that the constitution of Lebanon be changed so that the country be ruled by Sharia law, as with many other Arab and Islamic states, including the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA constitution declares: “The principles of Islamic Sharia shall be the main source of legislation.”

Recent upheavals in Lebanon are making local Christians communities worry about their existence as heirs and descendants of the first Christians. Christians in the Middle East now are facing a huge genocide — similar to the Christian genocide the followed the Islamic conquest of the Middle East in the 7^th century A.D.

Islamic jihadist groups are threatening Lebanese Christians and demanding that they submit to Islam. Lebanon’s Christians, descendants of Aramaic Syriacs, were the majority in the country a mere 100 years ago.

The demand for Christians to convert to Islam was one of the declarations issued by ISIS and other Islamic groups hiding in the mountainous border between Syria and Lebanon.

Saad Hariri, a Saudi-backed Sunni Muslim politician and the son of assassinated Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, recently invited every Lebanese party to his office to sign a document confirming that Lebanon is an Arab state. Arab state equals Islamic laws, as with all members of the Arab League. Why is it so important to Hariri or to the Sunni and Islamic world to include Lebanon as an Arab state and cancel its current name as a Lebanese state only?

And why do the Arab states, including the Palestinian Authority (PA), refuse to recognize Israel, with its 80% Jewish majority, as Jewish state, while at the same time trying to impose the definition of an Arab state on Lebanon, whose population is 35% non-Arab Christians?

There are approximately one million Syriac Maronites left in Lebanon, as well as another 700,000 Christians belonging to other churches. In addition, more than eight million Syriac Maronites live in the diaspora. These eight million Christians fled over the centuries because of persecution by Muslims, often conquerors of the Christian homeland. Lebanon was never a strictly Arab or Muslim. But that is the step that Saad Hariri, as a milder face of the expansionist ISIS ideology, would have us take — under the guise of a modern, moderate, Sunni secular front.

1560

Saad Hariri, a Saudi-backed Sunni Muslim politician in Lebanon, recently invited every Lebanese party to his office to sign a document confirming that Lebanon is an Arab state. Pictured above: Saad Hariri (right) with the late Saudi King Abdullah (left) in 2014.

Hariri’s request reveals what the Islamic world is planning for Lebanon, Israel and eventually Europe and the United States. World powers need to protect Christian, Jewish and other minorities in Middle East. Both Lebanon and Israel must remain homelands for persecuted minorities in Middle East — a Christian homeland in Lebanon and a Jewish homeland in Israel — connected to each other geographically, assisting each other economically, and perhaps soon with a peace agreement that could form a peaceful bridge in culture and human rights between the West and the East.

Bashir Gemayel, the great Christian Maronite Lebanese leader who was assassinated after being elected president in 1982, warned the West during Lebanese Civil War that if the Islamic forces fighting against Christians win, they would continue to the Western World, as they are, in fact, doing at present.

This agreement for an Arab Lebanese state being requested by the Sunni leadership is clearly intended to turn Lebanon into yet another officially Arab Muslim state. It aims to negate the rights of the original people in the land, just as the original Christian Copts of Egypt have been overrun, and the Aramaic Syriac Christians of Iraq have been overrun. In Lebanon, the original people of the land are the Aramaic-Phoenician Christians — especially the Maronites — who still preserve Syriac (the language Jesus spoke) as their sacred language. A full 95% of Lebanese villages are still called by Syriac Aramaic names. Islam and the Arabic language came to Lebanon late from Arabian Peninsula, after the seventh century.

Hariri’s wished-for step might also be supported by the Shiite Muslim party of Hizballah: both the Sunnis and the Shiites are Islamic. The next step will be to ask that the constitution of Lebanon be changed so that the land of the cedars is ruled by Sharia law, as with many other Islamic states, including the Palestinian Authority. Article 4 in the constitution of the future Palestinian state clearly notes: “The principles of Islamic Sharia shall be the main source of legislation.”

Implementing Islamic Sharia law means having Muslim sovereignty and control over the Aramaic Christian community.

If this Islamic ideology, implemented by so many countries, is not racism, then what is racism?

Why does the free world, including the churches and secular Western leaders, keep silent and demonize only Jewish Israel for protecting itself from the same threat and ideology?

“Speak the truth and the truth will set you free.” The Christians of Lebanon and entire Middle East can save their existence only by adopting this sacred sentence.

Categories: Arab nations, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Islamisation, Israel, Lebanon, Sharia law
Tags: Arab nations, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Islamisation, Israel, Lebanon, Sharia law

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I Love Islam

April 22, 2016

I Love Islam, Front Page Magazine, Dr. Stephen M. Kirby, April 22, 2016

Islamic schools in US

What Muslim-American children are being taught.

What are Muslim-American children being taught in private Islamic schools? We can learn about some of it by looking at the I Love Islam series used to teach elementary-level Muslim-American children about Islam. This series consists of five textbooks, each with a corresponding workbook and teacher/parent guide. It is published by the Islamic Services Foundation (ISF). According to the introduction to the series, its purpose is to gradually introduce Muslim students “to the essentials of their faith” by bringing “to light the historic and cultural aspects of Islam.” And according to the ISF website, the I Love Islam series “is one of the best-selling Islamic curriculums in the US and Canada.”

So what does this series teach?

It’s Palestine, not Israel

When it comes to showing the State of Israel, this series takes two approaches in depicting maps of the Middle East.

In the first approach, the geographical boundaries of the State of Israel are shown, but Israel is not named. The first example of this is on p. B7 of I Love Islam 1. Here states such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt are named; but there is no such mention of Israel. An interesting addition is found when this same map is used again on p. B2 of I Love Islam 2. On this map, the geographical boundaries of the State of Israel are now labeled “Palestine.” On p. A24 of I Love Islam 4, there is another map titled “Map of Palestine”; it includes the geographical boundaries of the State of Israel. This map shows the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, which is labeled “Occupied by Israel”; this is the only mention of Israel on that map.

With the second approach, Israel is mentioned on other maps used in this series. However, these maps are noticeably different from the maps mentioned above, in that these latter maps have more details and the print can be much smaller. The nature of these maps is so different from the ones used in the first approach that they appear to have been taken from some type of geography book. So if one looks closely (a magnifying glass helps), the name “Israel” can be found on the following three maps: I Love Islam 2, p. D13 (a map focusing on Egypt); and I Love Islam 4, pp. F8 and F24 (maps focusing on the African continent). But the small print and the extensive details on these maps would most likely deter the average elementary school-age student from examining them closely.

So in reality the Muslim-American children are being taught that the State of Israel does not exist. And, correspondingly, throughout this series the location for the city of Jerusalem is repeatedly stated as being in “Palestine”.^{^[i]}

Christians are in the “lowest status”

The Muslim-American children are taught this about Christians:

Many Christians believe that God has three parts:

God the father,
God the son, or Jesus Christ
God the Holy Spirit

In Christianity this is known as the Trinity. It says that the one God consists of three people. AstaghfiruAllah!^[[ii]] This is also a major form of shirk. As Muslims we know that God is the only Creator of the Universe. God or Allah does not have a father or a son and cannot be divided into two or three parts.

I Love Islam 5, p. A41

Shirk is the worst sin in Islam. The Muslim-American children learn that those who commit Shirk fall “from a very high status to the lowest one,” and are “forbidden” to enter Heaven.[iii] So Christians have fallen to “the lowest status” and are forbidden from entering Heaven.

The Muslim-American children learn that a person who commits Shirk is called a Mushrik.[iv] And the plural form ofMushrik is Mushrikun, so Christians are Mushrikun.

But why does it matter if Muslim-American children are being taught that Christians are Mushrikun? Because they are also being taught to learn and practice the teachings of the Koran.[v] So what does the Koran say about Mushrikun?

Here are some verses dealing with Mushrikun from a popular, authoritative translation of the Koran: Interpretation of The Meanings of the Noble Qur’an:[vi]

9:5 – Muslims are commanded to kill Christians unless the Christians convert to Islam:

Then when the Sacred Months (the 1^st, 7^th, 11^th, and 12^th months of the Islamic calendar) have passed, then kill the Mushrikun wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush. But if they repent [by rejecting Shirk (polytheism) and accept Islamic Monotheism] and perform As-Salat (the prayers), and give Zakat (obligatory charity), then leave their way free. Verily, Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

9:28 – Christians are impure and forbidden from entering Mecca:

O you who believe (in Allah’s Oneness and in His Messenger Muhammad)! Verily, the Mushrikun (polytheists, pagans, idolaters, disbelievers in the Oneness of Allah, and in the Message of Muhammad) are Najasun (impure). So let them not come near Al-Masjid Al-Haram (at Makkah) after this year…

9:33 – Islam will be superior to Christianity, even though the Christians don’t like it.

It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), to make it superior over all religions even though the Mushrikun (polytheists, pagans, idolaters, disbelievers in the Oneness of Allah) hate (it).

9:113 – Muslims are forbidden from asking Allah to forgive Christians who die as Christians:

It is not (proper) for the Prophet and those who believe to ask Allah’s forgiveness for the Mushrikun ((polytheists, idolaters, pagans, disbelievers in the Oneness of Allah), even though they be of kin, after it has become clear to them that they are the dwellers of the Fire (because they died in a state of disbelief).

15:94 – Muslims are to shun Christians.

Therefore proclaim openly (Allah’s Message – Islamic Monotheism) that which you are commanded, and turn away from Al-Mushrikun (polytheists, idolaters, and disbelievers).

98:6 – Christians are among the worst of creatures (there is a double-tap here).

Verily, those who disbelieve (in the religion of Islam, the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad) from among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) and Al-Mushrikun, will abide in the fire of Hell. They are the worst of creatures.

So the I Love Islam series ultimately teaches that Christians commit the worst sin in Islam; they are impure and forbidden from entering Mecca; Muslims are to shun them and not pray for them, but rather are to fight against them; that Christians are among the “worst of creatures”; and Islam is to be superior to Christianity.

The Example of Muhammad

Rasoolullah [Muhammad] was the best Muslim ever, and his job was to show all the Muslims the best way to do things. If we follow him, we will have a better understanding of how to practice Islam.

I Love Islam 4, p. C19

Throughout this series Muhammad is continuously lauded as the perfect role model to be followed if one wants to become an excellent Muslim. And it is specifically mentioned that the Sira (Seerah) of Muhammad “is there for us to learn lessons from.”[vii] The Sira is the authoritative biography of Muhammad, titled The Life of Muhammad (Sirat Rasul Allah).^{^[viii]} Here are some of the examples of Muhammad found in the Sira that “show all the Muslims the best way to do things”:

Muhammad ordered adulterers to be stoned to death – pp. 266-267, 652, and 684.
After a tribe was defeated, Muhammad would distribute some of the captured women and children among the Muslim warriors, and sell others of the captives – pp. 466, 511, and 791, n. 914.
Muhammad possessed and gave away slaves – pp. 499, 511, 576, 593, and 677.
Muhammad supervised the beheading of 600-900 captured Jewish males – p. 464.
Muhammad said that Muslims could beat their wives, “but not with severity” – p. 651.

Children, try your best to be like the Prophet, to think and act like him. This is why it is so important for us to learn the Seerah!

I Love Islam 2, p. B46

Conclusion

Elementary school is where children really start learning about the world around them. Beliefs and attitudes can be formed that may be difficult or impossible to later change. This brief overview of the I Love Islam series gives us an insight into what many Muslim-American children are being taught about Israel, Christians, and proper conduct in their lives. These “essentials” of Islam should not be comforting to non-Muslims.

____________________________

[i] I Love Islam 1, p. D47; I Love Islam 1, Teacher/Parent Guide, p. 115; I Love Islam 2, p. D28; I Love Islam 3, p. D63; I Love Islam 3, Workbook, Unit D, Chapter 6, Exercise 2; I Love Islam 4, pp. A21 and A24; and I Love Islam 4, Teacher/Parent Guide, p. 24.

[ii] I seek forgiveness from Allah! – An expression of shame or disapproval.

[iii] I Love Islam 5, pp. A46 and A48.

[iv] I Love Islam 5, p. A39.

[v] I Love Islam 2, p. C7.

[vi] Interpretation of the Meanings of The Noble Qur’an, trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan and Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali (Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Darussalam, 2007).

[vii] I Love Islam 2, Teacher/Parent Guide, p. 57.

[viii] Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad (Sirat Rasul Allah), trans. Alfred Guillaume (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Categories: Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamic indoctrination of children, Islamic integration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic tolerance, Islamism, Islamists in America, Israel, Palestinians and Jews
Tags: Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamic indoctrination of children, Islamic integration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic tolerance, Islamism, Islamists in America, Israel, Palestinians and Jews

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Islam is Winning and Western Civilization is losing – Parts I and II, America and Israel

April 19, 2016

Islam is Winning and Western Civilization is losing – Parts I and II, America and Israel, Dan Miller’s Blog, April 19, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations are winning. Islamic terror in America, Europe and Israel has killed a thousand or so people. That’s a lot, but Islamization kills entire civilizations; with the death of our civilization, more deaths than Islamic terrorism has brought can be expected.

Should we give up and voluntarily commit civilizational suicide? Much of Europe has already done so and that’s what Obama and His minions are seeking for America. The forces pushing for it are strong and we can react with greater strength only if we have the will. Do we?

Part I – America

a. Muslims already in Obam’s America

The video embedded above promotes a new book titled See No Sharia, which deals with the Muslim Brotherhood and related Islamist organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for America is laid out in a document put in evidence at the Holy Land Foundation criminal trial of several Islamist Muslim Brotherhood conspirators for funding Hamas, a terrorist organization, in violation of U.S. law.

[w]ritten in 1991 by a top Muslim Brotherhood operative, Mohamed Akram, and entitled “The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America,” this internal correspondence was meant for the eyes only of the organization’s leadership in Egypt. So, the document is direct and to the point: It explicitly states that the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America is “destroying Western civilization from within … by [the infidels’] hands and the hands of the believers so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” [Emphasis added.]

Following guilty verdicts against indicted conspirators, the Obama administration could (and should) have sought indictments against their multiple unindicted co-conspirators. It chose not to do so, most likely because pursuing the matter further would have been inconsistent with Obama’s world view — which seems to be consistent with that of the Muslim Brotherhood, et al.

See No Sharia, and to some extent the related video, illuminate ways in which Obama’s America has been seduced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslim Brotherhood-related Islamist groups into requiring our law enforcement agencies to reject the notion of Islamist Terrorism and to accept instead that of non-denominational “Violent Extremism.” We are repeatedly told that Violent Extremism has nothing to do with Islam.

Although the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazism should not be overlooked, it generally is.

It was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Cairo in 1928, that established Islamic Jihad as a mass movement. The significance of the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic Fascism is comparable to the significance of the Bolshevik Party to Communism: it was, and it remains to this day, the ideological reference point and the organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including Al Queda and Hamas. [Emphasis added.]

While British colonial policy contributed to the rise of Islamic radicalism, the Brotherhood’s jihad was not directed against the British, but focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews.

Membership in the Brotherhood rose from 800 members in 1936 to over 200,000 in 1938. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted a major campaign in Egypt, and it was against the Jews, not against the British occupiers. This campaign against the Jews, in the late 1930s, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement of Islamic Jihadists, was set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration from Europe and Russia. That campaign was initiated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini. [Emphasis added.]

Al-Husseini was extremely impressed with Adolf Hitler and his anti-Jewish rhetoric. In 1941 he visited Hitler in Berlin. He was so enthralled with Hitler and the Nazis, and their plans to exterminate the Jews that he decided to remain in Berlin. He lived there from 1941 to 1945, recruiting Muslims in Europe for the Waffen-SS. He was very close to Hitler. Husseini’s best friends were Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann.

He convinced Hitler that he would be able to persuade his Muslim brothers in the Arab world to carry out the extermination of Jews in the Middle East, just as the Nazis were doing in Europe.

Back then, Hitler was largely focused on the elimination of Jews. That remains the focus of Hamas, of which the Muslim Brotherhood remains a principal supporter. Might it be due to long-standing Muslim Brotherhood ideas that many blame all of the conflicts in the Middle East on the Jewish “occupation” of Israel? That view is held by Obama and members of His administration. Hence, their persistent efforts to turn parts of Israel over to the “Palestinians,” culminating in a two state solution giving Hamas and the Palestinian Authority enhanced leverage in driving Jews from Israel.

Under pressure from the Obama administration, our law enforcement agencies cooperate with Islamist organizations to implement Sharia principles to fight “Islamophobia” rather than to locate, arrest and prosecute Islamist terrorists and wannabe Islamist terrorists. One possible rationale is that if we are nice, they may reduce their efforts to “radicalize” Muslims and, perhaps, stop some Islamic attacks. Another more likely rationale is that our dear leaders actually believe that Islamophobia (along with the Jewish “occupation” of Israel) is the principal cause of Islamic terrorism and that Sharia compliance (along with the “two state solution” and death of Israel) will solve the problems.

America has no blasphemy laws and should want none. They would violate our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Organization for Islamic Cooperation, consisting of fifty-seven Islamic nations, has been pushing the United Nations to impose Sharia law-style laws prohibiting blasphemy. They do not seek such laws for their own nations because they already have them to protect Islam. They seek them for America and the rest of what’s left of Western civilization, but seem to have little or no interest in prohibiting “blasphemy” against Judaism or Christianity.

The cartoon is blasphemous under Sharia law because it depicts Muhammed; some Muslims seek to kill those who produce such material. An “art exhibit” featuring an image of the Virgin Mary in a glass of urine is considered sacrilegious; some Christians seek to have government funding removed. I am reminded of this rather old Andrew Klavan video:

b. Muslims coming to Obama’s America

As correctly observed in an article titled How Obama’s Refugee Policies Undermine National Security,

The issue of the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States has understandably ignited a firestorm of protest by Americans concerned about their safety and the safety of their families. These Americans are not exhibiting “xenophobia,” the usual claim made by the open borders immigration anarchists. They have simply been paying attention to what James Comey, the Director of the FBI, and Michael Steinbach, the FBI’s Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, have stated when they testified before congressional hearings about the Syrian refugee crisis. They made it clear that these refugees cannot be vetted. There are no reliable databases to check and no capacity to conduct field investigations inside Syria to verify the backgrounds of these aliens. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

I focused on these issues in my October 7, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “Syrian ‘Refugees’ and Immigration Roulette: How the government is recklessly playing with American lives.”

Further reports have provided disturbing information that ISIS operatives have seized blank Syrian passports and other identity documents, along with the printing devices used to prepare passports and other ID, and have sold these documents to reporters in false names. These identity documents are indistinguishable from bona fide documents because they are bona fide documents — except that the photos and biometrics do not relate to the original person but create credible false aliases for anyone willing to pay for them.

Even if we had the documentation referred to above, it would be of little help because due to pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-related groups, we are not allowed to “profile” Muslims. As noted here,

obeisance to politically correct proscriptions against “profiling” is just one of the myriad ways in which we tell the jihadist enemy we really aren’t serious about the latest battle in the 14-century-long war of Islam against the infidel West.

. . . .

This lack of seriousness is endemic in this administration. Refusing to call ISIS “Islamic,” even going so far as to censor comments by French president François Hollande that used the word, bespeaks a dangerous frivolity. . . .

Our problem, however, goes beyond the politicians. Too many of us have failed to understand that this war did not begin on 9/11. It did not begin when al Qaeda declared war on us in the 90s and attacked our embassies and naval vessels. It did not begin in 1979, when our alleged neo-colonialist depredations supposedly sparked the Iranian revolution and created today’s Islamic (N.B., Mr. President) Republic of Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism. It did not begin in 1948, when five Arab nations, all but one members of the U.N., violated Resolution 191 and attacked Israel. It did not begin when after World War I the victorious Entente powers exercised mandatory powers, granted by the League of Nations and codified in international treaties, over the territory of the Ottoman Empire that had sided with the Central Powers.

All these acts of aggression were merely the latest in a war begun in the 7th century when Islam attacked the eastern Roman Empire and began its serial dismemberment of the heart of Christendom, the old word for the West. For a thousand years the armies of Allah successfully invaded, conquered, occupied, enslaved, and raided the West, in accordance with its doctrine of jihad in the service of Muslim domination, and in homage to Mohammed’s injunction, “I was told to fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah.” This record of success began to end in the 17th century with the rise of the modern West and its technological, economic, and political advantages. [Emphasis added.]

But the war didn’t end with that Muslim retreat, even after what bin Laden called the “catastrophe” –– the demise of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the division of its territory into Western-style nation-states. The West won that battle, but it did not win the war. One reason is the Muslim nations of the Middle East never suffered the wages of their aggression. They sided with the Central Powers in World War I. They sat out World War II––apart from the many thousands who fought on the side of the Nazis––and received fugitive Nazis as guests after the war. Their serial aggression and terror against Israel has never been repaid with bombed-out capitals or punitive postwar reprisals. Their governments have never been punished for funding and proliferating mosques and madrassas teaching hatred of the infidel and terrorist violence in the service of jihad. [Emphasis added.]

Instead of paying the price of aggression, partly because of the Cold War, more recently because of Western failure of nerve and civilizational exhaustion, Muslims have been the beneficiaries of billions in Western aid, Western arms, Western defense against enemies, Western lax immigration policies, Western appeasement, and Western suicidal ideas like cultural and moral relativism. In short, Muslims have never accepted their defeats, and have never experienced the humiliating cost of their aggression, because the modern West has never forced them to pay for it. [Emphasis added.]

Thus they look at our unserious, godless culture of consumption and frivolity, of self-loathing and guilt, and these serious believers are confident that 350 years of defeat in battle have not led to defeat in the long war. And so the war goes on. The frivolous Western dogs bark, but Allah’s caravan moves on. [Emphasis added.]

Part II — Israel

Israel is constantly attacked by various UN organizations, most recently UNESCO, which has named the Western Wall after Muhammed’s flying horse, ~~Barac~~k Buraq.

There is a concerted effort among “Palestinians” and their supporters to erase all evidence of the historical connection of Jews to Israel. The UN, controlled by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, is a willing partner in these efforts. Besides being motivated by Islamic Jew-hatred, this endeavor is in line with the Islamic supremacist tendency to appropriate the holy places and sacred figures of other religions.

Buraq is claimed to have transported Muhammed from Mecca to Jerusalem, hence giving Palestinians valid claim to all of Israel. Here’s one depiction of Buraq. Obviously, there are no photographs of Muhammed actually riding him, because images of Muhammed are prohibited. Look closely at the picture. Where did the horse’s head come from?

Here’s an explanation of the Muslim nexus with the Western Wall:

Various scholars and writers, such as Ibn al-Faqih, Ibn Abd Rabbih, and Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, have suggested places where Buraq was tethered, mostly locations near the southwest corner of the Haram.^[7]However, for several centuries the preferred location has been the al-Buraq mosque, just inside the wall at the south end of the Western Wall plaza.^[7] The mosque sits above an ancient passageway that once came out through the long-sealed Barclay’s Gate whose huge lintel remains visible below the Maghrebi gate.^[7] Because of the proximity to the Western Wall, the area next to the wall has been associated with Buraq at least since the 19th century.^[8]

A New York Times editorial published in October of last year purported to compare the Jewish and Muslim claims to the Temple Mount. An article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine posed a few questions for the ~~NUT~~ NYT editorialists.

The Temple Mount is holy to Jews because of the Temples. So the New York Times chose to discuss whether the Temples really existed. It’s holy to Muslims because Mohammed supposedly flew there on a flying horse (with a woman’s head).

. . . .

Let’s interview some of the same scholars and archeologists as to whether the entire Muslim basis for laying claim to the area has any basis in reality. The New York Times discusses the need for “independent scientific verification” of the Temples. How about “independent scientific verification” of this?

Here are some things for the New York Times to verify…

1. Buraq was a flying horse with a woman’s head. Can we get any verification that such a creature ever existed.

2. Buraq flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and back in one night. “The distance between Mecca and Jerusalem is 755.1 miles. To complete this feat in one night would have meant that Buraq must have been jet propelled in the 7th Century.” Please provide independent scientific verification of the existence of a flying horse with a woman’s head that can travel faster than the speed of sound.

Oddly the New York Times doesn’t appear to be interested in independent scientific verification of Islamic Supremacist myths.

Evidently, UNESCO puts more stock in flying horses than in Jewish claims to the Temple Mount.

In view of the gravity of the Islam vs. Everybody Else situation, I decided to try to inject a bit of humor into only one of the many problems Israel faces with the UN, the OIC, Obama’s America, Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and others. I had originally intended to write a more comprehensive piece on Islam vs. Israel, and will probably do so after I post Part III of this series dealing with the Islamisation of Europe.

A better and more detailed account of the UNESCO – Temple Mount absurdity is provided here.

Conclusions

Obama’s America has the will to “win,” but confuses winning with eradicating Islamophobia and slicing Israel into pieces to give to the “Palestinians” and perhaps Syria, hence bringing “peace” to the Middle East. Under that definition of “winning,” Israel, the only democratic nation and the only solid ally of the United States in the region, will cease to exist; the Islamists will have won.

We need a very different version of “winning,” one under which our constitutional freedoms and our democratic nature will be cherished and protected. Both are inconsistent with Sharia law and are not part of any definition with which Obama would agree.

We can win against Islamist encroachments on our government and in our society only if enough of us recognize the dangers they entail. Then, we will have not only the means to win but the will to do so. A first step will be to bid Obama good riddance and to welcome a successor who recognizes the dangers of Islamism and is prepared — and wants — to move quickly and effectively against it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeJ-iv3MOTo

Categories: 2016 elections, Al-Aqsa Mosque, Antisemitism, CAIR, Christianity, Clash of civilizations, Defense of Israel, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom of speech, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Israel, Israel borders, Jerusalem, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Islam, Obama and Israel, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Sharia law, Temple Mount, United Nations, Violent extremism, Western Wall
Tags: Al-Asqa Mosque, Antisemitism, CAIR, Christianity, Clash of civilizations, Defense of Israel, Europe, Foreign Policy, freedom of speech, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic indoctrination, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Israel, Israel borders, Jerusalem, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Islam, Obama and Israel, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Sharia law, Temple Mount, United Nations, Violent extremism, Western Wall

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Turkey Builds Mega-Mosque in U.S., Blocks Churches in Turkey

April 18, 2016

Turkey Builds Mega-Mosque in U.S., Blocks Churches in Turkey, Gatestone Institute, Uzay Bulut, April 18, 2016

(Please see also, The loss of Jewish rights on the Temple Mount – cause and effect. — DM)

♦ As yet another enormous mosque has opened in the U.S. (funded by the Turkish government), Christians in Turkey are waiting for the day when Turkish state authorities will allow them freely to build or use their churches and safely pray inside them.

♦ In Turkey, some churches have been converted to stables or used as storehouses. Others have been completely destroyed. Sales of churches on the internet are a common practice.

♦ Meanwhile, Turkish President Erdogan said during the opening ceremony of the Maryland mosque that the center was important at a time of an “unfortunate rise in intolerance towards Muslims in the United States and the world.”

♦ How would Muslims feel if mosques in Mecca were put up for sale on the internet, turned into stables, or razed to the ground? How would they feel if a Muslim child were beaten in the classroom by his teacher for not saying “Jesus is my Lord and Savior?” How would they feel if they continually received violent threats or insults for just attempting peacefully to worship in their mosques?

On April 2, a gigantic Ottoman style of mosque was opened in Lanham, Maryland by the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The mosque, according to Turkish officials, is “one of the largest Turkish mosques built outside Turkey.”

Funds to build it, as reported by the Turkish pro-government newspaper, Sabah, came from Turkey’s state-run Presidency of Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, as well as Turkish-American non-profit organizations.

The mosque is actually part of a larger complex, commonly referred to as “Maryland kulliye.” Akulliye, as such Islamic compounds were called in Ottoman times, is a complex of buildings, centered on a mosque and composed of various facilities including a madrassa (Islamic religious school).

Erdogan recited verses from the Quran inside the mosque after the mosque was opened.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away from the American soil, in Turkey, Christians have for decades been deprived of the right to build their places of worship.

The 2015 report by Turkey’s Association of Protestant Churches revealed many violent, repressive and discriminatory practices against Protestant Christians in Turkey. According to the report, hate crimes, physical and verbal assaults as well as threats against Protestant Christians were commonplace in 2015 — as in previous years.[1]

“No development with regard to uncovering the perpetrators of these actions has occurred despite making known the content of the threats, the telephone numbers, email addresses, Facebook profiles and YouTube links of those making the threats in an official complaint,” according to the report.

Christians also experience many problems in the compulsory “religion and ethics” classes, which are mostly about indoctrinating schoolchildren in the teachings of Islam. An obligatory declaration of faith is one of the more serious problems facing Christians.

“The section for religious affiliation on the identity cards forces people to declare their faith and increases the risk of facing discrimination in every arena of life,” said the report. “For example, those who want to be exempt from mandatory religious instruction do not have the right to leave the religion line blank because they have to prove they are Christian in order for their children to be exempt from religion classes.”

Eleven-year-old Huseyin Bayram, for instance, a student at a primary school in Diyarbakir, converted to Protestant Christianity with his family in 2008. But because he was still officially registered as a Muslim, he had to take the compulsory Islamic class at school.

In 2010, Huseyin’s family lodged a complaint against the teacher of their child’s mandatory Islamic religious class, stating that the teacher slapped the child in the classroom.

Huseyin said that the teacher had asked the entire class to say the Islamic shahada (“There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah) three times; he did not do so. When the teacher asked him why, he said: “Sir, I go to the church. I do not know shahada and I do not want to learn it.”

The teacher, however, rejected the claims of beating: “I did not know the child was a Christian. I asked him the question that I ask to everyone.”

Like all other cities in present-day Turkey, Diyarbakir — called Dikranagerd or Dikrisagerd by the Armenian community — has a long history of Christianity.

After the division of the Roman Empire, Anatolia — from the Greek word “Anatole” meaning “east” or “sunrise” — became part of the Byzantine Empire. By the fourth century CE, Western and central Anatolia were overwhelmingly Christian and the inhabitants predominantly spoke Greek. A magnificent Christian civilization was established throughout centuries — until the territory was invaded first by the Seljuk Turks and later by the Ottoman Empire.

The year 1915 marked the peak of the Christian genocide, in Diyarbakir as well. “Most of the Armenians living inside the city were trapped,” wrote the Reverend Dr. George A. Leylegian, “and neighborhood by neighborhood, the Ottomans pillaged property and killed the helpless Dikranagerdtsis with nearly full-proof [sic] entrapment. The gendarmes sealed off each street and then raided the houses without reproach.”

Being a candidate for the European Union has not changed Turkey’s attitude towards churches and Christians.

This March, many places in Diyarbakir — including the Surp Giragos Armenian Apostolic and the Armenian Catholic churches — were expropriated by the Turkish government, as well as the Surp Sarkis Chaldean Church, the Virgin Mary Ancient Assyrian Church, and the city’s Protestant church.

Protestant Christians still experience serious problems establishing places of worship.

“Applications for opening a place of worship are rejected or left in a never-ending bureaucratic process. Previous applications that received either no response or a negative response are a clear indication of this situation…

“Apart from some exceptions, Christian congregations are prevented from using historical church buildings for Sunday services or holiday celebrations; these buildings are held by government institutions and are used for purposes other than church services.”

The Istanbul Protestant Church, for instance, officially requested that the Meryem Ana (Mother Mary) Church — in the hands of the city of Kayseri and used in the past as a sports center — be assigned to Christians living in Kayseri to meet their needs for a place of worship.

“No written response to this request has been given. However, in meetings with city officials, it was indicated unofficially that the church would be turned into a mosque or used as a museum. The church continued its efforts on this issue in 2015.”

1553

The Istanbul Protestant Church officially requested last year that local Christians be allowed to worship in the Meryem Ana (Mother Mary) Church — in the hands of the city of Kayseri and used in the past as a sports center. City officials indicated that the church would instead be turned into a mosque or used as a museum.

The city of Caesarea, today called Kayseri, was where Saint Krikor Lusavoric — or Saint Gregory the Illuminator (A.D 257-331), the patron saint and first official head of the Armenian Apostolic Church — was raised and adopted Christianity as his religion.

King Tiridates III of Armenia, under leadership of Saint Gregory, proclaimed Christianity the state’s official religion in 301. Armenia thus became the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion.

“If Mecca is considered to be sacred for Muslims,” according to the website of Foundation of Kayseri Surp Krikor Lusavoriç Armenian Church, “Kayseri is the same for Armenians being the first city where Christianity was adopted.”

“Kayseri had a robust Armenian presence up until the 1970’s,” wrote the author Aris Nalci. “Today, there are no active Armenian churches in the city, except for the Krikor Lusavorich Church located in the city center. “In 1915, there were more than 50,000 Armenians living in this large trade city; in 1965, it is said that 130 families still remained. Now, however, there are only a few Armenians left.”

Today, the last traces of Christianity in Kayseri are about to be extinguished.

The Agape Church Association in the city of Ordu also recently applied to Turkish state authorities to be able to use the historic Tasbasi Orthodox Church as its church. The provincial director of culture and tourism affairs rejected the application, saying that “the church will be used as an archeology museum.”

Ordu, or Kotyora in Greek, was an ancient Greek town in the northern region of Anatolia historically known as Pontus (which means “sea” in Greek).

Throughout centuries, Christians thrived in the city — until the Islamic invasion of the region. The Christian inhabitants of Ordu were also victims of the Greek and Armenian genocides perpetrated by Muslim Turks between 1913 and 1923.

“There are stories,” wrote the historian Sam Topalidis, “of Armenians from Ordu being huddled into boats only to be later thrown overboard into the Black Sea to drown.”

After deportations, mass murders, death marches, rapes and other atrocities — as well as the 1923 forcible population exchange between Greece and Turkey — Ordu has almost become devoid of its Christian population, as have all other Anatolian cities.

“Similar experiences over many years have rooted the belief in the Protestant community that the legal procedures to establish or build a church are practically impossible to meet and that this right only exists on paper,” reported the Association of Protestant Churches.

Sales of churches on the internet are a common practice.

The Assyrian Mor (Saint) Yuhanna church in the province of Mardin and the historic Saint John Greek church in Bursa were put up for sale by title owners in June, 2015.

In January, 2016, another historic Greek church in the province of Kayseri was offered for sale on the internet.

On February, 2016, a 300-year-old Armenian Catholic Church in the province of Bursa was listed on an internet shopping site by a real estate agent. Its price was 1.5 million dollars.

Giving the titles of churches to private individuals was one of the policies of the Armenian genocide, said the researcher Nevzat Onaran.

“In 1915, the lives and right to property of Armenians were destroyed. The churches put up on sale today are a declaration of the fact that the process of devastation that the [Ottoman Turkish] Committee of Union and Progress government started in 1915 is still going on.”

This policy has targeted not only Armenians, but all other non-Muslim peoples in Anatolia.

Some churches have been converted to stables or used as storehouses. Others have been completely destroyed.

As Muslims in the United States have built yet another enormous mosque with Turkey’s help, Christians in Turkey are waiting for the day when Turkish state authorities will allow them freely to build or use their churches and safely pray inside them.

In the meantime, Turkish President Erdogan said during the opening ceremony of the Maryland mosque that the center was important at a time of an “unfortunate rise in intolerance towards Muslims in the United States and the world.”

Christians in Turkey have been going through not only the most intense feelings of intolerance and hatred, but also unending attacks and even murders. The Christian culture and civilization in Anatolia is on the way to total annihilation.

“Particulars gleaned from studying earlier centuries help us as Westerners to perceive the unique relationship between the religion and politics and, hopefully, to understand its modern-day manifestations better,” wrote the scholar Judy Henzel.

Today Cappadocian Greek in Turkey is a dead language. Many local languages of indigenous Christians — including Pontic Greek, Western Armenian, Suret (Assyrian Neo-Aramaic), Turoyo (Western Assyrian), and Hertevin (Eastern Aramaic) — are on the verge of extinction. It is not only places of worship that are destroyed or left to devastation in Turkey, it is an entire civilization to which the West owes so much.

In that, not only the aggression of Muslim authorities, but also the apathy of many Muslim locals have played a large part.

How would Muslims feel if their mosques in Mecca were put up for sale on the internet? Or turned into stables? Or razed to the ground? How would they feel if a Muslim child were beaten in the classroom by his teacher for not saying “Jesus is my Lord and Savior?”

How would Muslims feel if they continually received violent threats or insults for just attempting peacefully to worship in their mosques? Or if they were always to live in fear of violence? Or if they were systematically treated as if they were second-class citizens — in their indigenous lands where their ancestors once ruled?

As these issues are not discussed in Muslim countries, similar crimes are committed repeatedly — day in and day out. Apparently, one of the most obvious changes that political Islam causes in one’s psyche is the loss of empathy.

Before Muslim political or religious leaders lecture the world about the non-existent threat of “Islamophobia” or “intolerance against Muslims” in the West, they might take moral responsibility and address the real abuses against Christians in their home countries, including the intense Christian- and Jew-hatred, and the actual Christian genocide — both physical and cultural — that is happening across the Muslim world.

_____________________

[1] Protestant Christians, like other Christian denominations in Turkey, do not enjoy the right to freely share their faith with people, or train their religious leaders. Protestant communities specifically do not have the right to organize as congregations, because they are not recognized as legal entities. The report gives detailed information about all of these daily discriminatory actions against Protestant Christians.

Categories: Christianity, Erdogan, Islam and Christianity, Mosques in U.S., Turkey, Turkey and Christianity
Tags: Christianity, Erdogan, Islam and Christianity, Mosques in U.S., Turkey, Turkey and Christianity

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Christians wither under Muslim rule

April 17, 2016

Christians wither under Muslim rule, Israel Hayom, Yoram Ettinger, April 17, 2016

Bethlehem’s Christian Arab leaders lobbied Israel against transferring the city to the Palestinian Authority. Thus, in 1993, on the eve of signing the Oslo Accords, the Christian mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij, urged then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to annex Bethlehem to Greater Jerusalem, as it was under Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule of the area, predicting that “transferring Bethlehem to the Palestinian Authority would relegate it to a town of many churches, but devoid of Christians.”

Before Oslo, the Christian mayor of Beit Jala — Bethlehem’s twin town — Farah al-Araj, told the late New York Times syndicated columnist William Safire: “The PLO will force a wave of Christian emigration, making Belize in Central America a home for more Beit Jala Christians then left in Beit Jala.” In 1967, shortly following the Six-Day War, then Mayor of Bethlehem Elias Bandak, a Christian, warned then Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan: “An Israeli failure to annex Bethlehem to Greater Jerusalem would doom the city’s Christian character.”

Since the 1993 establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the Christian majorities of Ramallah — Mahmoud Abbas’ headquarters — Bethlehem and Beit Jala have been transformed into insignificant minorities, due to physical, social, economic, legal and political intimidation. More Christian emigrants from these towns reside in Latin America than Christians remaining there.

The violent discrimination of Christians has been a systematic feature of Muslim Arab societies. For instance, in Saudi Arabia, Christians were murdered, expelled or converted until the 10th century. Currently, non-Muslims cannot become Saudi citizens and Christians working in — or visiting — Saudi Arabia are not allowed to worship, or display Christian items (Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, etc.), openly. While Egyptian President, General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, has attempted to minimize the traditional intimidation of Egypt’s Coptic Christian (10%) minority — which possesses ancient Pharaonic roots — the abduction of Coptic women and girls has been routine and Copts face deep-seated discrimination in all walks of life. Moreover, conversion to Christianity is prohibited under Islam. While physical assaults on Coptic communities were a daily occurrence during the brief rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, it has become a monthly event under el-Sissi.

The persecution of Christians in Arab lands is based on the teachings of Muhammad, which dominates the social, political, cultural, judicial, military and educational aspects of the Muslim Middle East. Therefore, the political establishments in Muslim Arab countries are not secular in the Western sense. According to the Quran, Jews and Christians — “the people of the book” who rejected Islam — transgressed egregiously, were the enemies of God, were rejected by God, causing Judaism and Christianity to be replaced by — and subordinated to — Islam, the only legitimate and inherently supreme religion. Islam commands Muslims to pursue the domination of the “House of Islam” over the “House of the infidel,” which includes Christians. Hence, the centrality of jihad, the holy war.

A typical Quranic reference to Christians and other “infidels” appears in Surah 5:60 and 86: “God cursed and blustered those whom he transformed to apes [Jews] and pigs [Christians]. … The infidels shall inherit hell.”

The submission of Christians and other “infidels” to Islam was further institutionalized under the seventh-century Pact of Umar, which severely restrained and humiliated Christians — and later extended to other “infidels” — consistent with the Quran.

In fact, the legalized persecution and scapegoating of Christians are in accordance with the Muslim concept of “dhimmis,” who are the non-Muslim citizens in Muslim lands. As stipulated by the Islamic code of law (the Shariah), they are subordinated to and protected by Islam as long as they accept Islamic supremacy. The attitude towards the dhimmis is specified in the Quran 9:29: “Fight the people who received the book [Jews and Christians] — who do not adhere to the truthful religion [Islam] — until they pay the jizya [infidel tax], while they are humiliated.” Non-Muslim citizens are faced with three choices: conversion to Islam, accepting dhimmitude or death.

Since the 1683 defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna, Islam has declined dramatically, witnessing the rise to global domination by the “infidel, inferior and arrogant” Christian world, and alarmed by the penetration of “infidel” ideologies and values into the “abode of Islam.” This perceived humiliation has led to tectonic eruptions of Islamic rage and terrorism, aimed at regaining the, supposedly, inherently supreme, megalomaniacal status of Islam.

Also, the Islamic religious and political establishments consider the “infidel” Christian/Western modernity and civil liberties clear, present and lethal threats, which fuel endemic domestic instability. Furthermore, the recent erosion of the Western posture of deterrence, as well as Western appeasement and retreats, have provided a tailwind to the Islamic surge, fueling the anti-Christian/Western Islamic rage in spite of the generally pro-Arab Christian/Western policy (including the U.S. arms embargo during Israel’s War of Independence, while the British supplied arms to the Arabs; punishing Israel for destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor; pressuring Israel to redivide Jerusalem; and President Barack Obama’s courting of Muslim regimes and condemnation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies).

While most of the Christian/Western world pressures Israel to accept Palestinian demands, a common battle cry in Palestinian Authority-inspired rallies is: “After Saturday comes Sunday,” which communicates a Muslim warning to Christian minorities throughout the Arab world: Muslims will do away with Christians after they have dealt with the Jews!

As befits the fate of dhimmis, churches, convents, monasteries, Christian cemeteries, schools, homes, land and Christian women in the Palestinian Authority are subject to desecration, destruction, burning, confiscation, intimidation, rape and harassment. For example, in April-May 2002, Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity — with its priests and nuns — was hijacked, looted and booby-trapped for 39 days by Palestinian terrorists.

The 1970-1982 Palestinian terror surge in Lebanon accelerated the flight of Lebanese Christians, reducing them from the ruling sector to a dwindling minority. Since 1993, the Palestinian Authority intimidation of Christians has intensified the flight of Christians. However, the Vatican and most Christian and Western governments have — knowingly — sacrificed the religious and civil liberties of Christian minorities — and their very existence — on the altar of wishful thinking, political correctness and appeasement.

Categories: Bethlehem, Christians, Foreign policy, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Jews, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Jerusalem
Tags: Bethlehem, Christians, Foreign Policy, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and Jews, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Jerusalem

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Christian Self-Defense Forces Emerge in Iraq & Syria

April 12, 2016

Christian Self-Defense Forces Emerge in Iraq & Syria, Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro, April 12, 2016

Babylon-Brigade-HP

Members of the Christian Babylon Brigade in Iraq (Video: screenshot)

The Christians of Iraq and Syria have had a breathtaking commitment to passivity since being victimized by what we all now finally agree qualifies as a genocide.

Now, the Christians are increasingly organizing to defend themselves—and the West should stand by them instead of outsourcing our moral responsibility to the Iraqis and their Iranian partners and various groups with questionable track records.

A poll in December 2014 found that only one-third of Iraqis say they are concerned about the persecution of Christians in their country. About 67 percent said they are not concerned at all or only “somewhat” concerned.

It’s easy to say that the U.S. should pressure the Iraqi government to protect the Christians, but its track record and these poll results do not inspire hope that it’ll work. The pace of the genocide is such that the Christians and those who care for them simply cannot afford to spend time hoping for the best.

A Christian force known as the Babylon Brigade has been incorporated into the Popular Mobilization Units, an assortment of militias led by the Iraqi government and their partners from the Iranian regime and Hezbollah. The Babylon Brigades and their supporters boast of their nationalism, having battled the Islamic State in non-Christian areas like Ramadi and Tikrit.

However, it numbers only 500 to 1,000 The Iraqi government should be applauded for supporting a Christian unit, but don’t mistake this for an Iraqi commitment to a Christian self-defense force that enables the community to have a say over whether it goes extinct or not.

Current U.S. policy still gambles their survival on the chance that the Iraqi government tied to Iran will protect them, particularly when the U.N. says Christian persecution in Iran has reached unprecedented levels.

The Kurds are allies of the U.S. but, when it comes to protecting Christians, they have been far from ideal. The Iraqi and Syrian Christians have plenty of stories of mistreatment at the hands of the Kurds.

The growth of a number of Christian self-defense forces in Iraq and Syria show potential for what could happen if they receive outside support.

There’s the Nineveh Plain Protection Units in northern Iraq under the helm of the Assyrian Democratic Movement of Iraq, which has a branch in northeastern Syria named the Gozarto Protection Forces. They are backed by the Middle East Christian Committee. The secretary-general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement claims that proper support would quickly grow the NPU’s numbers to 5,000.

Another small force is called Dwekh Nawsha, which is linked to the Assyrian Patriotic Party and has gotten attention because of Westerners joining their ranks. One of their advisers warned in November, “All we’re saying is we’re done. We don’t have equipment. We don’t have the weapons. We don’t have the training,” as he pleaded for U.S. backing.

In Syria, there is the Syriac Military Council, estimated to be about 2,000-strong including a Christian female unit. It belongs to a Kurdish-majority coalition known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. There is also a local Christian defense force near the Khabur River called the Khabur Guards.

Of course, any Christian force will have to be properly vetted. Hezbollah has set up a non-denominational force named Saraya al-Muqawama that includes Christians, Sunnis and non-religious Shiites.

A Christian police force that is favorable towards the Assad regime clashed with Kurdish forces in Qamishli, Syria. Sources close to the situation there emphasize that the Christians who embrace Assad are motivated by a fear of Islamist rebels, not because of any affinity for dictatorship or the regime’s brutality.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the viability of Christian self-defense forces because of their current sizes and capabilities. Unlike the Iraqi and Syrian militias and rebels, the Christians have had to rely only upon themselves for survival. They don’t have a state sponsor like Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Iran to build them up.

The U.S. has provided material support to Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, despite records of human rights abuses, Islamism and ties to terrorists and enemy regimes. The Christians are reliable foes of Islamic extremism who, despite all they have suffered, have never formed a sectarian militia to exact bloody revenge.

It’s time for the U.S. to ask itself: Why are Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds worthy of our direct material aid but the Christians are not? Why do they deserve a chance to stop the murder, raping and torturing of their people, but the Christians do not and are left facing extinction if trends continue?

Categories: Christian fighters, Christians, Foreign policy, Iran - Syria war, Iraq war, Islam and Christianity, Islamic State, Kurds, Syria war
Tags: Christian fighters, Christians, Foreign Policy, Iran - Syria war, Iraq war, Islam and Christianity, Islamic State, Kurds, Syria war

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