Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (27 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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If such Saudi-sponsored hate is being taught in Muslim schools a few miles away from the capital of the United States, how ubiquitous must it be in the Islamic world?
Consider Pakistan. A November 2011 report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom demonstrates that Pakistani school textbooks promote intolerance for Christians, Hindus, and all non-Muslims, and that most school teachers view non-Muslim minorities as “enemies of Islam”: “Religious minorities are often portrayed as inferior or second-class citizens who have been granted limited rights and privileges by generous Pakistani Muslims, for which they should be grateful.”
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Another report, issued in April 2012 by the Catholic National Commission for Justice and Peace, details how Pakistani school textbooks “promote religious fanaticism, discriminate against minorities and trigger religious conflicts.” As in other Muslim countries, Christians and Hindus “are obliged to learn the basics of Islam”—studying the Koran is mandatory—while their own religions are openly denigrated. Even in subjects such as social science and linguistics, “about 20% of the content is linked to Islam.”
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Bonus points can be earned by anyone, including non-Muslims, who excel in Islamic studies, while Christians cannot earn extra points for excelling in their own religion.
This kind of educational abuse is also common in Turkey—which is still being touted as “secular” by the mainstream media and Western academics. In February 2012 the Turkish Association of Protestant Churches’ annual Report on Human Rights Violations noted, “Christians in Turkey continue to suffer attacks from private citizens,
discrimination by lower-level government officials and vilification in both school textbooks and news media
[emphasis added].” A “root of intolerance” prevails in Turkish society toward adherents of non-Islamic faiths: “The removal of this root of intolerance is an urgent problem that still awaits to be dealt with.”
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Despite promising to reform its school textbooks, Turkey’s Ministry of Education made no changes to a tenth-grade textbook that portrays the Assyrian Christians—the nation’s longest-established indigenous community—as traitors. Objections were raised back in 2011, and the Turks, like the Saudis, had issued a statement promising to revise the texts in the next printing, scheduled for 2012. Yet the books were reprinted in October 2012 without any improvements. “In fact, the negative and slanderous portrayal of Assyrians [Christians] has increased in the new edition,” decried one reviewer.
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“The book now not only portrays Assyrians as traitors in the past but says the Assyrians continue their betrayal of Turkey today.” The Assyrian International News Agency pointed out that Turkey’s government still denies the Armenian genocide of Turkey’s Christian population and is in fact “not hesitant to distort historical events by inverting victim and perpetrator.”
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Ironically, instead of reforming its own textbooks to reflect objective history, the chairman of the Turkish parliament’s education committee engaged in projection, accusing the French government of “planting seeds of hate” for including the Armenian genocide in French history and geography school books.
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(Most objective historians agree that about 1.5 million Christian Armenians were systematically slaughtered during World War I in a deliberate policy of genocide ordered by the Ottoman government.)
The anecdotes above demonstrate the role of Muslim governments in inciting, or inculcating, anti-Christian sentiment. An Islamic cleric on an October 2012 episode of Al Hafiz TV, an Islamic satellite station, explained why Christian teachings must never be taught in Muslim classrooms, even to Christians: “they truly stab at the rulings of Islam,” that is, Christian teachings contradict Islamic teachings and thus must be suppressed. To exemplify, he read from a Christian text that said “the Christian religion does not differentiate between women and men, but it confirms their perfect equality: it gives them an equal share in inheritance, it bans divorce, and it bans polygamy.”
“Now,” said the sheikh, “if my son hears such things while he’s in school, he’ll come home and say to me, ‘Father, why do you have many wives? You are unjust—unlike Christianity which is full of justice!’” The cleric went on to complain that Christian teachings contradict “the religion of the prophet,” who of course had many wives—more than the Koran’s prescribed four; made divorce a simple matter for men; and decreed that females inherit only half of what males inherit. The cleric complained that Muslim men who try to exercise their Islamic rights—to polygamy, double-inheritance, and easy divorce (now via text messaging, as a recent fatwa allows)—become “criminals, and the religion [Islam] that taught them such things taught them crimes.” In short, “it is impermissible to produce texts that contradict the teachings of the Koran”
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—another echo of Islam’s ban on free speech and non-Muslim proselytism.
While negative depictions of non-Muslims proliferate in Islamic school textbooks, a whitewashed image of Islam predominates in Western education, particularly in the United States. According to a 2009 American Textbook Council report citing a number of popular textbooks used by American junior and senior high school students, “key subjects like jihad, Islamic law, [and] the status of women are whitewashed” because of political correctness, or out of fear of Muslim activists. Discussing the strikes of 9/11, one textbook never mentions Islamic ideology, referring to the nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers simply as “teams of terrorists”—this despite the fact that al-Qaeda has repeatedly articulated its distinctly Islamic worldview, with a stress on hating “Christian infidels” and waging jihad on them.
One seventh-grade American textbook offers wishful thinking in place of facts: “Jihad represents the human struggle to overcome difficulties and do things that are pleasing to God. Muslims strive to respond positively to personal difficulties as well as worldly challenges. For instance, they might work to be better people, reform society, or correct injustice.” Impressionable American students are unlikely to guess that “correcting injustice” could mean killing an apostate and “reforming society” could include subjugating Christian infidels—as is happening now under the “Arab Spring”—but that is exactly how many Muslims would understand jihad.
Even the primary sources of Islamic history, written by authoritative Muslim historians venerated throughout the Islamic world, make it absolutely clear that Islam conquered much of what is today called the “Muslim world”—including half of what then constituted the Christian world—by the sword; but the report finds that these facts are glossed over or distorted in American textbooks. Islam ambiguously “spread” or was “brought” to those areas. This is from the same textbooks that allot whole chapters to bemoaning the Crusades and portraying Christians as intolerant fanatics (ignoring the fact that the Crusades were in response to jihadi conquests of Christian lands and the centuries-long persecution of Christians).
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Learning Hatred from the Law
 
Another way that Muslim governments contribute to the hatred of Christians has to do with the justice systems in Muslim countries. Regardless of what is formally written about religious equality and citizenship in the constitutions of these nations, authorities will rarely if ever side with Christians vis-à-vis their Muslim persecutors. When it comes to Muslim-on-Christian violence, police habitually look the other way until Muslim culprits have done their damage and fled. This pattern is most obvious in cases when Muslims riot and destroy churches. It often takes police hours to arrive, and the perpetrators are rarely arrested—whereas the Christian victims often are. When Muslims rob, plunder, or annex the land of Christians, authorities ignore it, sometimes even warning the Christians not to complain. The police may not actively side with the mob, but they do not want to be in the awkward position of arresting and prosecuting fellow Muslims—which might make them appear un-Islamic, and thus worthy of the same treatment as Christians.
Muslim authorities have also sided with Muslim abusers in instances of Christian girls being abducted, raped, and forced to convert to Islam and “marry” their Islamic kidnappers. On those rare occasions when such rape victims escape back to their frantic families, police often seize them and return them to their Islamic rapist “husbands,” a scenario that is played over with great frequency, particularly in Pakistan.
Legal complicity in Muslim violence against Christians can be traced to the Islamic doctrine of “Loyalty and Enmity,” which commands Muslims always to side with fellow Muslims against non-Muslims. This doctrine is built atop Koranic verses such as 5:51, which warns believers against “taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies . . . whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them,” that is, any friend of the Christians becomes himself an “infidel.” According to the classical and authoritative exegete al-Tabari, Koran 5:51 means that the Muslim who “allies with them [non-Muslims] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community.”
One can easily see how this teaching compels Muslim authorities never to “ally” with and “enable” Christians against Muslims— but rather to turn a blind eye to Muslim abuse of Christians. Similar scriptures include Koran 3:28, 4:89, 4:144, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 58:22; the last simply states that true Muslims do not befriend non-Muslims—“even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin.” Likewise, according to Muhammad, “A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He neither oppresses him nor humiliates him nor looks down upon him”
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—certainly not for the sake of the hated infidels, whatever their grievances.
Two stories, both from May 2012 in Egypt, illustrate how the “Loyalty and Enmity” doctrine plays out in practice. In a court verdict that was criticized by human rights organizations as “unbelievable” and “extremely harsh,” twelve Christians involved in a riot were convicted to life imprisonment while eight Muslims—including some who had participated in the torching of nearly sixty Christian homes—were acquitted, all to thunderous cries of “‘Allahu Akbar!’” in the courtroom.
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A different Muslim judge in Upper Egypt dismissed all charges against a group of Muslims who had accused a Christian man of having an affair with a Muslim woman, terrorized his family for over a year, and finally cut off his ear in a knife brawl while trying to force him to convert to Islam.
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Spotlight on the Maspero Massacre
 
An especially egregious example of how Muslim governments exonerate Muslim persecutors of Christians, and also brutally punish those same Christians for standing up for their basic human rights, is Egypt’s Maspero Massacre, in which the military killed twenty-eight Christians and injured several hundred.
Days after the destruction of St. George Church in Edfu—which at the time was only the latest of several churches Muslim mobs had attacked and destroyed in Egypt—thousands of frustrated Christian Copts staged a protest in Maspero near Cairo on October 9. In response, the military—earlier hailed by the Western media for its patriotism and “gentleness” towards protesters calling for Mubarak’s ousting—brutally punished Egypt’s Christian citizens. Among other atrocities, Copts were chased and literally run over by armored vehicles; many gruesome images of flattened people were caught on tape. Death squads of snipers were deployed atop buildings the night before the planned protest to kill and terrorize demonstrators.
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Eyewitnesses, including Muslim bystanders, attested that they saw soldiers hurling the mutilated bodies of slain Christians into the Nile to cover up the evidence.
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Anti-Christian animus clearly fueled this attack. Videos record soldiers screaming “Allahu Akbar!” (Islam’s primordial war cry) and cursing “infidels” as they approached and attacked Christian protesters. A soldier boasting that he shot a Christian in the chest is greeted with shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” from the crowd around him.
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Christians were so hunted that some Muslims, in “Schindler’s List” fashion, even helped hide the Christians from the military. An Arabic report titled “Egypt’s Schindler” recounts the story, a splendid exception to the general rule of Muslim indifference to hate crimes against Christians. A Muslim owner of a company based in Maspero near the site of the Christian massacre had to struggle to get past the dead and wounded who filled the entrance of his company’s building. When he went up to his office, he saw the look of “horror on the terrified faces” of his employees and of some forty Copts, including a priest, who had sought shelter there. The staff told him how the military police, armed with machine guns, had broken into the company’s headquarters searching for Christians, who hid in the restrooms. Some Muslim employees in the company gave their ID cards to the Christians to hide their true identity from the military during the carnage.
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Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of the atrocities, Egypt’s Military Council, ruling at the time, held a news conference after the massacre in which senior official Mahmoud Hegazy spun lie after lie. The military, he said, would “
never
,
never
” run over civilians. That very idea was “
impossible
,
impossible!
. . . Shame on those who accuse the Egyptian military of such things! . . .
Never
has our military run over a single person, not even when combating the Enemy [Israel].”
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