Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (37 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

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Blurring the line between the victim and oppressor is a regular tactic of the mainstream media, especially when it comes to reporting on Muslim persecution of Christians. This is especially apparent in Boko Haram’s genocidal jihad on Nigeria’s Christians. For example, a February 2012 BBC report on a church attack that left three Christians dead, including a toddler, stated the bare-bones facts in its first two sentences and immediately jumped to the apparently really important news: that “the bombing sparked a riot by Christian youths, with reports that at least two Muslims were killed in the violence. The two men were dragged off their bikes after being stopped at a roadblock set up by the rioters, police said. A row of Muslim-owned shops was also burned.... ” The report goes on and on, with a special section about “very angry” Christians, until one all but confuses victims with persecutors, forgetting what the Christians are “very angry” about in the first place: unprovoked and nonstop terror attacks on their churches, and the unprovoked murders of their community’s women and small children.
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Similarly, the
Los Angeles Times
deemed it newsworthy to report the aforementioned story of the Egyptian off-duty police officer who boarded a train, identified Copts, and then opened fire on them while screaming “Allahu Akbar”—but only to exonerate him (and Islam), as is clear from the report’s headline: “Eyewitness claims train attacker did not target Copts, state media say”
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—the same state media that habitually whitewashes the oppression of Egypt’s Christians.
A February 2012 NPR report titled “In Egypt, Christian-Muslim Tension is on the Rise” does fairly report on some stories, but still leaves readers with more questions than answers: “In Egypt, growing tensions between Muslims and Christians have led to sporadic violence [Initiated by whom?]. Many Egyptians blame the interreligious strife on hooligans [Who are they? What is their motivation?] taking advantage of absent or weak security forces. Others believe it’s because of a deep-seated mistrust between Muslims and the minority Christian community [What are the sources of this mistrust? Is it reasonable for Christians to mistrust Muslims?].” The photo accompanying the story is of a group of angry Christians, one defiantly holding a cross aloft—not of Muslims destroying crosses, which is what prompts Christians to such displays of religious solidarity.
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Media also dissemble the jihadis’ otherwise obvious motivation. For example, a March 2012 Agence France-Presse (AFP) report describing Boko Haram’s many attacks on Christians and officials concludes with the following sentence: “Violence blamed on the sect [Boko Haram],
whose goals remain largely unclear
, has since 2009 claimed more than 1,000 lives, including more than 300 this year alone [emphasis added].”
19
In fact Boko Haram has been bellowing its quite straightforward goals since at least 2007. They want to enforce Sharia law and to subjugate (if not eliminate) Nigeria’s Christians .
20
And yet here is the venerable Agence France-Presse claiming ignorance about the Islamist group’s motivations. One would have thought that a decade after the jihadi attacks of 9/11—a decade in which images from all around the world of Muslims in militant attire shouting distinctly Islamic slogans such as “Allahu Akbar!” and calling for Sharia law and the subjugation of “infidels” became practically ubiquitous—reporters would know by now what the motivations of such Islamic organizations are.
Yet another
New York Times
report, one that appeared on December 25, 2011—the day after Boko Haram bombed several churches during Christmas Eve services, leaving some forty dead—is a good example of how the media refracts reality through the approved paradigm of political correctness, minimizing or ignoring Muslim persecution of Christians around the world (lest reporters should appear to side with Christians), while always putting the best spin on Muslim violence (lest they should appear critical of Islam).
The
New York Times
declares,
The sect, known as Boko Haram,
until now
mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday
represented a new, religion-tinged front
, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims. [Emphasis added.]
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This is absurd. Boko Haram had been terrorizing Nigerian Christians, killing them, and destroying their churches—all in the name of Islam—for several years before these Christmas Eve bombings. As a matter of fact, on the previous Christmas, December 25, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing thirty-eight Christians.
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The
New York Times
’s characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only inaccurate but unconscionable.
Moreover, the assertion that there are “already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims” suggests that both camps are equally motivated by religious hostility. But where are the Christian terror organizations that bomb mosques in Nigeria every Friday to screams of “God is Great”? They simply do not exist.
The report goes on to offer more well-worn canards, including the suggestion that the Nigerian government’s “heavy-handed” response to the terrorists is responsible for their terror: “Critics of the government campaign against Boko Haram say that the effort has not only failed but has increased the sect’s appeal, because the security forces’ heavy-handed tactics have given it new sympathizers.”
The
Times
even manages to insert another favorite meme of the mainstream media—the poverty-causes-terrorism myth: “The sect’s attacks have been further bolstered by festering economic resentment in the impoverished and relatively neglected north, which has an exploding birthrate, low levels of literacy and mass unemployment.” This despite all the evidence that many of the most notorious Islamic terrorists are well educated and come from wealthy families, including Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, the current head of al-Qaeda—and that the terrorists’ Christian victims are often worse off than they are.
As for those who fail to tout the party line on Islam, the mainstream media has resorted to ostracizing them. For example, in January 2011, the
Washington Post
’s “On Faith” blog posted an article dealing with Muslim-Christian relations, in light of recent attacks on Christians in the Muslim world. Regular contributors were invited to respond. The response of Willis E. Eliot, a retired dean of exploratory programs at New York Seminary, was rejected. Up till then, Eliot had been published on that blog almost weekly for over three years. This was his first contribution to be rejected in all that time.
What caused the
Washington Post
to reject his submission? The nonagenarian Eliot had written frankly about the roots of Islamic violence in Islamic theology:
Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Islam, to the contrary, is essentially hostile to “the infidels” . . . Jesus was anti-violent, Muhammad was violent . . . Muslims become violent, or threaten violence, when they feel offended: when we Christians feel offended, almost never do we become violent, and almost always we suffer the disrespect in silence.
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Eliot’s observations are borne out by Muslim and Christian scriptures, by history, and by current affairs. But they go against the one unwavering dogma to which the mainstream media clings—moral and cultural relativism. Hence the need to suppress them.
No doubt the editors of “On Faith” were expecting the usual boilerplate responses on the subject of Muslim attacks on Christians in the Muslim world: acknowledge their existence, yes, but be quick to revert to the usual narrative—that Muslim violence is anything but a byproduct of Islamic indoctrination. That is essentially how most other contributors responded: one found Christian fundamentalism as troubling as Muslim fundamentalism; another bemoaned how scriptures can incite violence, while being careful not to mention any particular religion or scripture; yet another counseled suffering Christians to “turn the other cheek” and forgive their persecutors, cloyingly adding that all violence “can be overcome with our radical love”—easy sentiments to preach while safe in distant America.
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In short, while the mainstream media may report a few facts from the most spectacular incidences of Christian persecution, they employ an arsenal of semantic games, key phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism to uphold a narrative first forged by virulently anti-Western academics in the 1960s and 1970s: that Muslim violence and intolerance are products of anything and everything—poverty, political and historical grievances, or territorial disputes—except Islam.
There is, of course, one reason why the mainstream media is reticent to report objectively on Christian persecution under Islam. Of all forms of Islamic violence, the abuse of Christians where Muslims are in power has the capacity to completely undermine the liberal narrative that has dominated politics for decades. Muslim violence in Europe or against Israel poses no challenge to that narrative: in both cases, Muslims are seen as the underdogs, who may be sympathized with no matter how much they lash out. They may be screaming and rioting, firing rockets, and destroying property—all while calling for the death and destruction of the “infidel” West or Israel’s Jews to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Still, this bloodlust can be portrayed as a natural byproduct of the frustration Muslims feel as an oppressed minority, “rightfully” angry with the “colonial” West and its Israeli proxy.
But if Muslims get a free pass when their violence is directed against those currently stronger than themselves, how does one reason away their violence when it is directed against those who are weaker than they are, those who have no political influence whatsoever—in this case, the millions of Christians suffering under Islam? The rationalizations used to minimize Muslim violence against the West and Israel simply cannot work here, for now Muslims are the majority—and
they
are the ones violent and oppressive to their minorities, in ways that make Western and Israeli treatment of Muslims seem enviable.
In other words, Christian persecution is perhaps the most obvious example of a phenomenon the mainstream media wants to ignore out of existence—Islamic supremacism. Vastly outnumbered and politically marginalized Christians in the Islamic world simply wish to worship in peace, and yet they still are hounded and attacked; their churches are burned and destroyed; their children are kidnapped, raped, and enslaved. These Christians are often identical to their Muslim co-citizens in race, ethnicity, national identity, culture, and language; there is generally no political or property dispute on which the violence can be blamed. The only problem is that
they are Christian
—they are the
other
—and so they must be subjugated, according to Sharia’s position for all others; for all
infidels
, including Israel and the West.
If the mainstream media were to report honestly on the persecution of Christians under Islam, the obvious implications that Islam is dangerously hostile to
all
non-Muslims would be inescapable. Hence, journalists develop an instinct—or make a deliberate choice—to ignore or minimize these uncomfortable facts. No wonder so many Americans, including most self-professed Christians, are either totally unaware of the phenomenon or have no idea of its extent or significance.
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: ENABLING THE PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS
 
The American public is largely at the mercy of the mainstream media when it comes to information about events in the Muslim world. But what does one make of the actions of the United States government, which has access to the best intelligence available? In both words and actions, the Obama administration has not only ignored Muslim persecution of Christians, but also actually enabled it.
While the plight of Christians under Islam has never been a burning issue for earlier U.S. administrations, there were some valid reasons for this. As we have seen, Christian persecution under Islam, though ancient, is also relatively “new” in the modern era—returning in earnest around the 1970s and progressively getting worse. It would obviously take Western governments some time to acknowledge and adjust to the new reality on the ground. And while today a number of humanitarian organizations report on the reality of Christian suffering in Muslim lands, such information was largely unavailable in earlier years, or at least much more difficult to access—even for the intelligence community. There was no Internet.
These excuses obviously do not apply to the current Obama administration. The situation of Christians in the Muslim world has become much worse, even as Western intelligence has become much better. But not only has the administration ignored the increasingly obvious plight of Christians under Islam, Obama’s wholesale support for the “Arab Spring” has thoroughly empowered those Muslim forces especially hostile to Christian minorities.
Consider the administration’s handling of recent events in Egypt. Although former president Hosni Mubarak was the United States’ central ally in the Middle East for thirty years, the Obama administration made it a point to throw him under the bus soon after protests began against him. Again, it was one thing for the mainstream media to portray the Arab Spring in glowing terms, but quite another thing entirely for the White House—which is privy to the best intelligence and area expertise—to go along lock, stock, and barrel with this narrative. After all, there was a reason why former U.S. administrations were supportive of autocrats like Mubarak: they knew that the alternative would be Islamists, who are as bad for U.S. interests as they are for religious minorities. This has been confirmed by recent events in Egypt, where many Egyptians—including a great many who had voted for Morsi—are rising up against him and his Islamist agenda, only to be brutally suppressed by the state, with validations by Islamic fatwas demonizing and permitting the slaying of those who resist Morsi.
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