Our rights in Egypt,
as Christians or converts, are less than the rights of animals. We are deprived
of social and civil rights, deprived of our inheritance and left to the
fundamentalists to be killed. Nobody bothers to investigate or care about us. –
Maher Al-Gohary, Muslim apostate
One of the most disturbing consequences of the “Arab Spring,”
the tragic misnomer given by the giddy news media to a violent surge of Islamic
fundamentalists against despised Western “puppets” such as Libya’s Qaddafi and
Egypt’s Mubarak, is an undisguised genocide against Christian communities in
those regions. Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on
Christians,
the new book by the Freedom Center’s Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim, exposes
that genocide not so much as a new war but as the renewal of a very old one.
Ibrahim is, as FrontPage readers well know, a Middle East
and Islam specialist best-known for The Al Qaeda Reader. He has appeared
in media venues from MSNBC to Reuters to Al Jazeera to Fox News, lectured at
universities and before government agencies, and even testified before Congress
on the plight of Egypt’s Christian Copts.
“Christians are being
persecuted in Muslim countries today,” Ibrahim writes,
for the same reasons as in past
centuries. And the patterns of persecution – the same motivations, the same
actions, and the same horrific results – recur in countries as different as
Kenya and Denmark. Those patterns emerge from themes in the Koran, in Islamic
theology, in Sharia law, and in Islamic culture.
Those patterns lead Ibrahim to the inexorable conclusion
which he hammers home throughout the book: “One thing alone accounts for such
identical patterns in such otherwise diverse nations: Islam itself – whether
the strict application of its Sharia, or the supremacist culture born of it.”
Indeed, Ibrahim notes that of the top 50 countries documented for Christian
persecution today, 42 are either Muslim-majority nations or have sizeable
Muslim populations, and no other factors – economic, political, or ethnic –
account for that overwhelming predominance.
After documenting some examples of recent Christian
persecution in disparate regions, Ibrahim ties them together thusly:
Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the
Philippines have very little in common. These countries do not share the same
language, race, or culture. What, then, do they have in common that explains
this similar pattern of church attacks during Christian holy days? The answer
is Islam.
Ibrahim’s argument
is that this era was primarily the result of the impact of Western civilization
in breaking down fanaticism in Islamic lands. Muslims even began emulating
Western ways, “sloughing off their Islamic identity and mentality and the contempt
for ‘infidels’ that… is an integral part of that mentality.” That Golden Age,
unfortunately, “was the historical aberration,” and what reversed the trend was
a fresh contempt for the West’s “new culture of sexual licentiousness, moral
relativism, godlessness, and even Western self-hatred that flooded Western
societies in the 1960s.” Muslims also fed off “the hyper-criticism of the West
and its values by leftist Western intellectuals,” a faction that remains
complicit today.
Ibrahim traces the fascinating history and theological
origins of Islam’s “innate hostility to Christianity,” which it targets in no
small measure because Christianity, the largest religion in the world and
Islam’s historical enemy, is a proselytizing faith – which Islam, with its rigid
laws against apostasy, blasphemy, and proselytism, cannot abide. Also,
Christians historically have embraced martyrdom rather than betray their faith.
But he also notes that
Christians suffer violence at the
hands of Muslims for reasons that go beyond conscious
applications of Islamic doctrines. The hostility Sharia engenders toward
Christians has permeated the culture, mentality, and worldview of the average
Muslim.
Ibrahim goes on to catalog a jaw-dropping, relentless litany
of examples of forced conversion, attacks on churches and the cross, and savage
persecution of Christians throughout the Muslim world, a list broken down by
country. He classifies this “climate of hate” into three general categories:
harassment by Muslim governments, attacks by Muslim mobs, and attacks by
jihadis.
As for why this crisis attracts so little attention, he
points to three enormously influential institutions: Western academia, for
whitewashing Islam and blaming the West; Western media, for obscuring the
persecution; and Western governments for enabling it. They “have all refused to
acknowledge what Christians are suffering… in keeping with their reluctance to
recognize that Islam itself is the cause of this persecution.” It is this
reticence that drives those institutions, for example, to portray “unprovoked
Muslim attacks on Christians… as ‘sectarian strife.’” Blurring the line between
victim and oppressor, Ibrahim writes, “is a regular tactic of the mainstream
media, especially when it comes to reporting on Muslim persecution of
Christians.”
Ibrahim rightly points the finger more specifically at the
Obama administration, which in both words and actions “has not only ignored
Muslim persecution of Christians, but also actually enabled it,” through
Obama’s “wholesale support of the ‘Arab Spring.’” He also takes Western
Christians themselves to task for buying into the mainstream narrative and for
a tendency “to express compassion for anyone and everyone other than fellow
Christians.”
“The return of the persecution of Christians under Islam,”
Ibrahim concludes, “is the most visible aspect of a larger and more dangerous
phenomenon: the return of Islam as a global force.” And we ignore that
persecution at our peril.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 6/24/13)
