Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (24 page)
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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim
BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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In November 2012 an Egyptian court decreed that eight Christians living in America—seven native Egyptians, and one American, Pastor Terry Jones—be sent to Egypt to be executed in connection with the sixteen-minute You Tube video about Muhammad, “Innocence of Muslims.” The prosecution offered no real evidence against the Christians, most of whom deny any involvement with the video, but instead relied on inciting Muslims against the accused by playing the video in the courtroom.
In September 2012 twenty-seven-year-old Christian Albert Saber was accused of posting clips of the Muhammad movie—which he had downloaded from a Muslim site, not You Tube. Muslims attacked and evicted him and his mother from their home. Later Albert was arrested; he is currently incarcerated awaiting a likely multi-year sentence.
In March 2012, Makram Diab, a 49-year-old Christian man, was sentenced to six years in prison for “insulting Muhammad.” He had gotten into a religious argument with a Muslim colleague, who went on to protest that Diab had offended Muhammad. The Christian was subsequently arrested and sentenced to six years in a ten-minute mockery of a trial where Diab was not even allowed proper representation. Though “defamation of religion” is currently a misdemeanor under Egyptian law, punishable by a prison sentence of one month to three years, the judge doubled the sentence to appease protesting Muslims—including an angry mob, 2,500 strong, which had surrounded the courtroom Diab was in, demanding his death.
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In August 2012, Bishoy Kamil, a Christian in his twenties who worked as a teacher, was arrested and given six years in prison for posting cartoons deemed insulting to Islam and its prophet on Facebook. He admitted to managing the page in question, but said it had been hacked. Like Makram Diab, he was given more than double the maximum penalty to appease a mob calling for his death.
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In April 2012, Gamal Abdu Massud, a teenage Christian student, was sentenced to three years on accusations that he had posted a Muhammad cartoon on his Facebook account, which had only some 135 friends. Apparently the wrong “friend” saw it, for it was not long before local Muslims rioted, burning the Christian teenager’s house as well as the homes of five other Christians. Massud was subsequently arrested and tried and is currently serving his sentence.
In June 2011, Naima Wahib Habil, newly hired as director of a junior high school for girls, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on the accusation that she had torn a copy of the Koran in front of her students. The story had inspired mob riots and calls for her death.
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In July 2011, Muslims rioted demanding the death of Coptic business tycoon Naguib Sawiris because he had posted a picture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse dressed in Salafi attire on his Facebook account. Due to his high profile, he was acquitted in an Egyptian court—but not after Islamic media stations had thoroughly demonized him to the point that he has since left Egypt for Europe.
Magdi Khalil of Coptic Solidarity, an organization devoted to helping Egypt’s oppressed Christians claim their human rights, has accused prosecutors in these cases of relying “exclusively on circumstantial evidence. And the judges do not behave like impartial judges, but rather as demagogues haranguing an already frenzied mob, and then sacrificing the Copts to satisfy them. Nor do they allow any representation for the accused. Judges just show up and pass their verdicts in very brief mock trials.” Khalil confirms that “Egypt is rapidly turning into another Pakistan,” adding that, “even those Christians who manage to avoid prison, their lives are often ruined, they have to flee their homes and villages, they lose their jobs and find it hard to get a new one.”
Pakistan and now Egypt are the Muslim countries where Christians are most at risk of blasphemy prosecutions, but examples abound from across the Muslim world. To show how widespread this phenomenon is and how it crosses racial and national boundaries, the following are three cases from three very different regions—Far East Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the Arab world.
IndonesiaIn February 2011 over a thousand rioting Muslims stormed an Indonesian courthouse because a Christian, Antonius Richmond Bawengen, had received what they deemed to be too lenient a sentence for blasphemy—the maximum five years. They attacked the judges, prosecutors, and, of course, the defendant—injuring nine people, including a missionary priest. The mob also attacked two churches and a Christian school and set vehicles on fire. Bawengen was found guilty of “spread[ing] hatred about Islam” because he had distributed pamphlets that some Muslims deemed offensive to Islam and Muhammad.
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Ethiopia138
In May 2011, a recently widowed Christian man in Ethiopia was accused of “desecrating the Koran” and forced to spend two years in prison, where he was abused, pressured to convert to Islam, and left partially paralyzed. On returning home, he discovered that his two young children had been abducted by local Muslims: “My life is ruined—I have lost my house, my children, my health. I am now homeless, and I am limping.”
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Tunisia139
In Tunisia, the “moderate” Muslim country where the “Arab Spring” began, one of the first things Ennahada, the new ruling Islamist party, did in August 2012 after winning elections was to file a bill to criminalize offenses against “sacred values,” including prison terms and fines for broadly worded offenses such as insulting or mocking the “sanctity of religion,” including “insults, profanity, derision and representation of Allah and Mohammed.”
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SILENCING THE GOSPEL140
Although Islam’s anti-proselytism law regularly oppresses Christians indigenous to the Islamic world, it has also—since St. Francis in the thirteenth century, as we have seen—oppressed Western Christians who try to talk to Muslims about the Gospel. Recently, for example, in December 2012 in Pakistan, Birgitta Almby, a seventy-year-old Bible school teacher from Sweden, was shot by two men in front of her home and died soon thereafter. She had served in Pakistan for thirty-eight years. Police said they could not find the assassins and could not unearth a motive, though Christians close to her have no doubt “Islamic extremists” murdered the elderly woman: “Who else would want to murder someone as apolitical and harmless as Almby, who had dedicated her life to serving humanity?”
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Her assassination fits a familiar pattern. In one month alone, March 2012, two American Christians were murdered in Iraq and in Yemen in the context of proselytism.
Spotlight on American Christians141
Her assassination fits a familiar pattern. In one month alone, March 2012, two American Christians were murdered in Iraq and in Yemen in the context of proselytism.
On March 1, 2012, Jeremiah Small, a “beloved teacher and friend” who taught at a Christian school “in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, in Iraq’s most peaceful region,” was shot to death by an eighteen-year-old student, even “as he bent his head to pray at the start of a morning class. The 33-year-old teacher from Washington State took bullets to the head and chest and died at the scene.”
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According to students, “‘Mr. Jeremiah’s hands were still folded in prayer when he fell.’” According to
World
magazine, the day before the shooting “a heated discussion” had broken out between Small and one of his students, “during which the pupil threatened to kill the teacher because of conflicting religious views.”
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According to students, “‘Mr. Jeremiah’s hands were still folded in prayer when he fell.’” According to
World
magazine, the day before the shooting “a heated discussion” had broken out between Small and one of his students, “during which the pupil threatened to kill the teacher because of conflicting religious views.”
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While the
Wall Street Journal
called the source of the quarrel a “mystery,”
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CBS reported that Small “was a devout Christian who frequently praised Christianity and prayed in the classroom, and his friends in Washington said his evangelism is what motivated him to teach in Iraq.” A pastor who once interviewed Small says, “He knew he was putting his life on the line.... He felt this was a way to serve and touch some lives for God.” His parents wrote on Facebook, “Our oldest, Jeremiah was martyred in Kurdistan this a.m.”
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And the Muslim father of the pupil who killed Small portrayed Christians such as the slain American teacher as “more dangerous than al-Qaeda.”
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Wall Street Journal
called the source of the quarrel a “mystery,”
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CBS reported that Small “was a devout Christian who frequently praised Christianity and prayed in the classroom, and his friends in Washington said his evangelism is what motivated him to teach in Iraq.” A pastor who once interviewed Small says, “He knew he was putting his life on the line.... He felt this was a way to serve and touch some lives for God.” His parents wrote on Facebook, “Our oldest, Jeremiah was martyred in Kurdistan this a.m.”
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And the Muslim father of the pupil who killed Small portrayed Christians such as the slain American teacher as “more dangerous than al-Qaeda.”
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On March 18, 2012, just a few days after Jeremiah Small’s murder, Joel Shrum, a twenty-nine-year-old American teacher living in Yemen with his wife and two children, was shot eight times and killed by gunmen and members of the al-Qaeda-linked Supporters of Sharia. The group later issued a message saying, “This operation comes as a response to the campaign of Christian proselytizing that the West has launched against Muslims,” calling the teacher “one of the biggest American proselytizers.” Although his employers issued a statement insisting that Shrum would never do such a thing as talk about Christianity around Yemen’s Muslims, Shrum’s wife indicated in an interview that Shrum was an open Christian, likely to share his faith. There is no reason to doubt his Islamic murderers when they say he was targeted for “proselytizing.” There are other Westerners in Yemen. If supporters of Sharia were simply targeting American infidels in general, there would be more random killings.
Not all Americans talking about Christianity in the Muslim world are murdered; some manage to get away after a sound thrashing. For example, in Indonesia in October 2011 an American family was attacked by a Muslim mob that set fire to their property and vehicle after they were accused of proselytizing Muslims. “Only the intervention of police saved the lives” of David Ray Graeff, his wife Georgia, and their two sons Benjamin and Daniel, from “an enraged mob spurred by a local religious leader.”
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Right around the same time, angry Muslims and Indonesian authorities expelled Christians from their Protestant church and shut it down for allegedly engaging in proselytizing in “a predominantly Muslim area.” As in previous cases when churches were seized, “the fundamentalists were aided and abetted by the local administration.”
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Right around the same time, angry Muslims and Indonesian authorities expelled Christians from their Protestant church and shut it down for allegedly engaging in proselytizing in “a predominantly Muslim area.” As in previous cases when churches were seized, “the fundamentalists were aided and abetted by the local administration.”
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Likewise, in Bangladesh in February 2012, according to the
New York Post
, three American Christians were injured after their car was attacked by a Muslim mob that suspected they were converting Muslims into Christians. At least two hundred irate locals chased the missionaries’ car and threw stones at it, cutting the Americans with the broken shards of glass.
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New York Post
, three American Christians were injured after their car was attacked by a Muslim mob that suspected they were converting Muslims into Christians. At least two hundred irate locals chased the missionaries’ car and threw stones at it, cutting the Americans with the broken shards of glass.
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Still, the bulk of persecution for sharing the Gospel in the Islamic world is reserved for indigenous Christians, simply because there are many more of them than foreign Christians. Examples from all corners of the Islamic world follow.
AfghanistanAccording to a September 2012 report by ASSIST News Service, “Christian evangelism [in Afghanistan] has turned into a sensitive and complicated issue in the last 10 years. Muslims target Christians every day. They use the Islamic Sharia Law to charge Christians with blasphemy. The rate of growth of Christianity in Afghanistan has caused Afghani Muslim clerics to consider it a threat.”
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In July 2007, the Taliban abducted twenty-three South Korean Christian missionaries, executed two men, and later released the rest, after South Korea “agreed to end all missionary work in Afghanistan. . . .”
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In September 2008, Amin Mousavi was arrested for “allegedly promoting Christianity” and sentenced to death, although he was later released and fled the nation. And the Taliban, although ousted of power by then, killed several converts to Christianity in a spree in 2004: “A group of Taliban dragged out Mullah Assad Ullah and slit his throat with a knife because he was propagating Christianity. ”
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Algeria151
In September 2008, Amin Mousavi was arrested for “allegedly promoting Christianity” and sentenced to death, although he was later released and fled the nation. And the Taliban, although ousted of power by then, killed several converts to Christianity in a spree in 2004: “A group of Taliban dragged out Mullah Assad Ullah and slit his throat with a knife because he was propagating Christianity. ”
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In March 2006 the Algerian parliament approved a new law that requires a prison sentence of two to five years plus a heavy fine for anyone “trying to call on a Muslim to embrace another religion” or anyone who “stores or circulates publications or audio-visual or other means aiming at destabilizing attachment to Islam.”
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In May 2011, Karim Siaghi received the maximum five-year prison sentence and the maximum fine on the accusation that he had shared a Christian CD with a Muslim and blasphemed the prophet. In November 2011, during Siaghi’s appeal hearing, more evidence emerged. The Muslim merchant who brought the accusations against him had earlier initiated a conversation on religion with him: “Unhappy with Siaghi’s non-Muslim answers, the merchant tried to force him to pay homage to the Prophet and to recite the Muslim
shahada
: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ When Siaghi refused and said he was a Christian, the merchant filed a complaint that the convert had belittled the Prophet, and in the absence of further witnesses, charges were brought against him. The merchant was said to have seen Siaghi give a CD to someone, but never appeared in court to testify to that effect.”
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In May 2011, Karim Siaghi received the maximum five-year prison sentence and the maximum fine on the accusation that he had shared a Christian CD with a Muslim and blasphemed the prophet. In November 2011, during Siaghi’s appeal hearing, more evidence emerged. The Muslim merchant who brought the accusations against him had earlier initiated a conversation on religion with him: “Unhappy with Siaghi’s non-Muslim answers, the merchant tried to force him to pay homage to the Prophet and to recite the Muslim
shahada
: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ When Siaghi refused and said he was a Christian, the merchant filed a complaint that the convert had belittled the Prophet, and in the absence of further witnesses, charges were brought against him. The merchant was said to have seen Siaghi give a CD to someone, but never appeared in court to testify to that effect.”
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