Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (33 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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A Coptic chronicle describes the situation of Egyptian Christians in the 700s:
And out of love for money he [the Muslim governor of Egypt] commanded the governors to put the people to death, and bring him their money; and wrote to them, saying: “I have delivered up to you the lives of the people, therefore collect all the wealth that you can, from bishops or monks or churches or any of the people, and bring stuffs and money and cattle and all that you find belonging to them, and respect no one. And whatever place you visit, pillage it.” Accordingly, the officials laid the country waste and carried off the columns and the woodwork, and sold what was worth ten dinars for one dinar. . . . ”
 
Many Christian monks were tortured and mutilated for money.
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The same story of rapacity and brutality was repeated all over the Islamic empire. In Armenia decades after the above anecdote, a Christian chronicler wrote,
In the reign of Abdallah [Abu Jafar al-Mansur, who ruled from 754–775] and on the orders of Yazid, Armenia was struck by extremely onerous taxation. The infernal avarice of the implacable enemy was not satisfied with devouring the flesh of the Christians, the flower of the country, nor with drinking their blood as we drink water; Armenia in its entirety suffered horribly from the absolute lack of money. Every individual, even by giving all he had, his clothes, his food stuffs and prime necessities, did not succeed in paying his ransom and redeeming his person from torture. Gibbets, presses and gallows had been set up everywhere; nothing but fearful and continual torture was seen everywhere.
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While such episodes typify the early years of Islam, they punctuate the whole of dhimmi history from one corner of the Islamic world to the other. The cautious jizya entry in the
Encyclopaedia of Islam
states that “with or without doctrinal justification, arbitrary demands [for money] appeared at times.” Even the medieval Marco Polo, whose chronicles appear impartial and objective,
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made an interesting observation concerning the Muslims in Tauris (modern day Iraq) in the thirteenth century:
According to their doctrine, whatever is stolen or plundered from others of a different faith, is properly taken, and the theft is no crime; whilst those who suffer death or injury by the hands of Christians [during the course of a plunder-driven raid], are considered as martyrs. If, therefore, they were not prohibited and restrained by the powers who now govern them, they would commit many outrages. These principles are common to all Saracens .
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This lust for money was so great in the early years of Islam, under the Umayyads, that many non-Muslims tried to convert to Islam to avoid absolute poverty and destitution only to be prevented from converting by the Muslim governors, who preferred to treat them as “milk camels.”
With the codification of jizya, the havoc gave way to systematic collection—punctuated by only occasional eruptions of violent rapine—and Christians settled in for centuries of slow bleeding. Juridical opinions concerning the amount of money dhimmis were to pay varied, from the minimal one dinar to sums that were ruinous for previously thriving, now impoverished non-Muslim communities. Institutionalized jizya—financial extortion—was another factor, on top of legal discrimination and physical persecution, which compelled nearly half of the then-Christian world to convert to Islam, while impoverishing most of the rest. Despite what apologists for Islam now teach in classrooms in the West, primary sources provide abundant proof that the jizya was sometimes “exacted from children, widows, orphans, and even the dead.”
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In fact at least one school of Muslim law, the Shafi‘i, asserts, “Our religion compels the poll tax to be paid by dying people, the old, even in a state of incapacity, the blind, monks, workers, and the poor, incapable of practicing a trade.”
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Much of this financial fleecing came to an end thanks to Western intervention. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, one Muslim region after another abolished the jizya and gave non-Muslims newfound rights—originally to appease Western powers, later in emulation of the victorious West. The Ottoman Empire’s Hatt-i Humayun decree of 1856 abolished the jizya in many Ottoman-ruled territories. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, the jizya was gradually abolished wherever Western powers were present.
Today, however, as Muslims reclaim their Islamic heritage—to the approval and encouragement of the West, now under the spell of “multiculturalism”—both aspects of jizya have returned: ransom money must once again be systematically collected from Christians, as the Koran and Sharia law command, or else it is taken by force and bloodshed. Violent depredations on Christians have made a dramatic comeback now that Muslims are once again emulating the earliest years of Islam. As they wage jihad to overthrow secular governments, they see Christian minorities as “milk camels” that must pay for their existence by being milked dry.
Consider the words of Sheikh Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini, spoken several years ago, on what the Muslim world can do to overcome its economic problems. The sheikh justified the forced conversion and enslavement of non-Muslims—and held out the jizya as an enticement to Muslims to participate:
If only we can conduct a jihadist invasion at least once a year or if possible twice or three times, then many people on earth would become Muslims. And if anyone prevents our dawa [invitation to conversion] or stands in our way, then we must kill or take them as hostage and confiscate their wealth, women and children. Such battles will fill the pockets of the Mujahid [holy warrior] who can return home with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women and 3 or 4 children. This can be a profitable business if you multiply each head by 300 or 400 dirham. This can be like financial shelter whereby a jihadist, in time of financial need, can always sell one of these heads.
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Spotlight on Iraq
 
Recent events in Iraq demonstrate what happens to Christian minorities once the jihad is let loose. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown by U.S. forces and a provisional government established, jihadis saw their opportunity and made a putsch for power—unleashing a virulent jihad in Mesopotamia in the name of creating an Islamic emirate. In the context of this new jihad, the paradigm of the earliest years of Islam—when the original Muslim conquerors were consolidating power and building empire with the blood of innocent non-Muslim populations—has returned. As jihadis seek to empower themselves, the lives of Christian minorities who do not pay jizya is forfeit. The only way they can redeem themselves is through ransom money—jizya, which, as seen above, simply means “compensation” for their lives.
Attacks on Christians began on the heels of Saddam’s fall when jihadis launched a coordinated bombing campaign on Baghdad’s churches in the summer of 2004. Among other atrocities committed since then, beheading and crucifying Christians
124
are not infrequent occurrences. Threats such as “you Christian dogs, leave or die” are typical.
125
Jihadis call the church an “obscene nest of pagans” and threaten to “exterminate Iraqi Christians.”
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Though Christians make up less than 5 percent of Iraq’s population, they are nearly 40 percent of the refugees fleeing Iraq.
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Moreover, according to a December 2009 report by Aswat al-Iraq (“Voices of Iraq”), 1,960 Christians were targeted and killed since 2003, the “property of at least 500,000 Christians were taken away and 200,000 Christians were forced to pay extortion money, while dozens others were kidnapped and then released for ransom.”
A 2007 AP report summarizes the situation of Iraq’s Christians in the context of jizya and plunder:
Despite the chaos and sectarian violence raging across Baghdad, Farouq Mansour felt relatively safe as a Christian living in a multiethnic neighborhood in the capital. Then, two months ago, al-Qaida gunmen kidnapped him and demanded that his family convert to Islam or pay a $30,000 ransom. Two weeks later, he paid up, was released and immediately fled to Syria, joining a mass exodus of Iraq’s increasingly threatened Christian minority. “There is no future for us in Iraq,” Mansour said.... In the recent violence, residents of the Baghdad neighborhood of Dora said gunmen knocked on the doors of Christian families, demanding they either pay jizya—a special tax traditionally levied on non-Muslims—or leave. The jizya has not been imposed in Muslim nations in about 100 years [during the colonial era]. . . . In the northern city of Mosul, men began knocking on doors last month, demanding that Christian families pay a $3,000 tax that would be used to fight the U.S.-led forces, local residents said. Some paid; others fled.
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The AP report also alludes to the collective punishment of Iraq’s Christians in response to the American invasion: “some Islamic insurgents call Christians ‘crusaders’ whose real loyalty lies with U.S. troops.” Christian persecution increased “after Pope Benedict XVI made comments perceived to be anti-Islam. Church bombings spiked and a priest in the northern city of Mosul was kidnapped and later found beheaded.... Many churches are now nearly empty, with many of their faithful either gone or too scared to attend.”
The report also explains how “Criminal gangs made use of the situation and they started to kidnap Christians and demand ransom. It is a coalition between terrorists and criminals.” Compare this trend to the aforementioned “dark side of forced conversion to Islam” in Pakistan, which “involves the criminal elements who are engaged in rape and abduction and then justify their heinous crimes by forcing the victims to convert to Islam. The Muslim fundamentalists are happy to offer these criminals shelter and use the excuse that they are providing a great service to their sacred cause of increasing the population of Muslims,” according to the Asian Human Rights Commission.
Today, despite the fact that the majority of Iraq’s indigenous Christians have fled their homeland, jihadis are still trying “to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood,” in the words of Muslim Caliph Suliman Abdul Malik. In May 2011, a Christian youth was abducted and, when his family could not come up with the exorbitant ransom, his Islamic captors beheaded him. “The murder was meant to intimidate Christians so that in the future they will more readily pay ransom demands,” said a source.
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Christians cannot expect much help from the authorities. As one Iraqi Christian man put it in December 2010, “Contacting the authorities forces us to identify ourselves, and we aren’t certain that some of the people threatening us aren’t the people in the government offices that are supposed to be protecting us.”
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Non-jizya-paying Christians are not merely to be plundered of their money or their lives, but of their loved ones as well, including wives and children. In December 2012, for example, Ayatollah Ahmad al-Hassani al-Baghdadi issued a fatwa on TV, calling Christians “polytheists” and “friends of the Zionists,” and adding that “their women and girls may legitimately be regarded wives of Muslims.”
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Finally, Iraq’s few remaining Christians are, as is to be expected, being plundered of their faith as well. An October 2011 report titled “the double lives of Iraq’s Christian children” tells of their suffering—“If the children say they believe in Jesus, they face beatings and scorn from their teachers”—as well as the struggle of their parents: “‘The first years of my faith,’ says a father, ‘I brought so many people to church, because I was motivated, so excited.... Now I don’t encourage anyone to be a Christian, because in my experience it is very hard.’”
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Indeed, as we have seen, since the seventh century—with a brief respite from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century—it has been “very hard” for Christians to be Christian virtually anywhere in the Islamic world, which is precisely why, over the course of fourteen centuries, Christians in Islamic countries—who originally made half of the world’s Christian population—largely converted to Islam.
Spotlight on Syria
 
In an ironic twist of fate, large-scale Christian persecution has now come to Syria, which only recently was a primary place of asylum for Christians fleeing the persecution in Iraq. Because jihadis are involved in trying to overthrow the rule of Bashar Assad—with U.S. support—the same exact pattern of persecution experienced by Iraq’s Christians has come to Syria’s Christians as well. As one top official of the Russian Orthodox Church put it, “We are deeply worried by what is going on in Syria, where radical forces are trying to come to power with the help of Western powers . . .
Where they come to power, Christian communities become the first victims
” [emphasis added].
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Thousands of Syrian Christians have fled their homes; entire regions and towns where Christians have lived for centuries, since before Islam came into being, have now been emptied as the Islamist-led opposition intentionally targets Christians—kidnapping, plundering, and beheading at will. In August 2012 a car bomb was detonated in the Christian area of Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, as “a crowd of faithful, families, elderly people, women and children, were heading to the cemetery to bury two young people. The two had died a day earlier, on August 27, also victims of an IED [improvised explosive device]. As the crowd, after the funeral, was accompanying the deceased to the burial, a taxi exploded causing 12 deaths [according to other sources, twenty-seven], including 5 children, and injuring more than 50 people.” Further, “a family of Armenian Christians was found murdered, and all members of the family horribly decapitated.”
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