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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (38 page)

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Next, the Obama administration supported a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Muhammad Morsi, now President of Egypt, while overlooking the Brotherhood’s decades-long history of working to impose Sharia on Egypt—not to mention their fatwa calling for Coptic churches’ destruction. Sayyid Qutb, the “godfather” of modern-day jihad, who highlighted the need to subjugate the non-Muslim world, was a Brotherhood leader. Senior Muslim Brotherhood officials still admit their goal is to resurrect the caliphate; they tend to say things on live TV such as, “Yes, one of these days, we [Muslim Brotherhood] will be masters of the world.”
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President Morsi himself, during the presidential elections, publicly recited the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto, “The Koran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path and death in the name of Allah is our goal”
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—a motto that any “martyrdom-seeking” jihadi would be proud of. Despite all this, in February 2011, to justify the administration’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described the Muslim Brotherhood as “largely secular. ”
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The administration has even gone so far as to invite to the White House a member of the notorious al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya.
29
This is an organization designated “terrorist” by the U.S. government, not least for its role in the aforementioned Luxor Massacre and its countless terror attacks on Egypt’s Copts stretching back to the 1970s. On the other hand, Christians from the Middle East are sometimes banned access to the White House. On November 22, 2011, the Beirut Arabic-language news agency al-Nashara reported that, at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dalia Mogahed canceled a planned meeting between Obama and the Christian Maronite patriarch of Lebanon.
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Mogahed, an observant Muslim who wears the hijab, was personally selected by Obama to serve as an advisor on, ironically, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
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The Obama administration has even intervened militarily to help Islamist forces. The most obvious example is Libya. After U.S. forces helped Islamic rebels in Libya to assume power—or, in the words of an
Examiner
headline, “U.S. supports Al Qaeda ‘freedom fighters’ against Gaddafi in Libyan civil war”
32
—the thanks the U.S. received was an al-Qaeda attack on the American consulate in Benghazi and the murders of four American officials, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. To hide the fact that the al-Qaeda rebels whom the Obama administration empowered in Libya were behind this terrorist attack, the administration tried to frame the attack as a response to a You Tube movie about the prophet of Islam.
Yet the day before the attacks on U.S. missions (including the U.S. embassy in Cairo) began, I had, based on Arabic reports, exposed the fact that al-Qaeda-connected Islamists were threatening to attack American embassies unless the U.S. released the “Blind Sheikh” and other imprisoned jihadis.
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One Arabic report I cited appeared a full three days before the attacks began on September 11, 2012—a premeditated date chosen deliberately. But the mainstream media did not pick up on any of this; the attacks were portrayed as unexpected and impromptu, and all blame was attributed to Youtube moviemakers living in the United States. The Obama administration was only too happy to endorse this narrative, despite all the independent intelligence it had otherwise.
The true nature of Libya’s “liberation” is becoming ever clearer. Most recently, in late February 2013, reports appeared of Christians, including one man holding dual U.S. and Swedish citizenship, being arrested on proselytism charges. Then some one hundred Christian Copts from Egypt, most of them trying to work in Libya, were also arrested and tortured by the nation’s Sharia-supporters (“Ansar al-Sharia”) for possessing Bibles. Among other abuse, their heads were shaven and some who wore the Coptic wrist tattoo had it painfully removed with acid. One Christian man, Ezzat Hakim Atallah, died.
Interestingly, Obama had earlier justified U.S. military intervention in Libya primarily on humanitarian grounds. In his March 28, 2011, speech, he spoke of “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” adding that not assisting them “would have been a betrayal of who we are.” The administration has used this same humanitarian argument to support Syria’s rebels, a great many of whom, as we have already seen, are jihadis—including al-Qaeda members—decimating Syria’s Christian population.
34
On the other hand, the Obama administration has exhibited no concern for “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings” in cases where Muslim regimes slaughter Christians. For example, after the Egyptian military massacred Christian Copts in Maspero, running them over with armored vehicles, the White House responded by saying, “Now is a time for restraint on all sides”—as if Egypt’s beleaguered and unarmed Christian minority needs to “restrain” itself against the nation’s military.
35
In short, the flipside of the Obama administration’s support for its Islamist allies has been a lack of U.S. support for the Islamists’ enemies, or, more properly, victims—chief among them, Christian minorities. For example, according to a June 7, 2012, CNS report,
The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports. The new human rights reports—purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered—
are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role. For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011
and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report—a full two years behind the times—or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011. [Emphasis added.]
36
 
The CNS story goes on to quote several U.S. officials questioning the motives of the Obama administration. Former U.S. diplomat Thomas Farr said that he has “observed during the three-and-a-half years of the Obama administration that the issue of religious freedom has been distinctly downplayed.” Leonard Leo, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said, “to have pulled religious freedom out of it [the report] means that fewer people will obtain information,” so that “you don’t have the whole picture.”
Of course, this would not be the first time that the Obama administration has censored information related to Islam. In October 2011 the administration announced it was “pulling back all training materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have claimed are offensive.” In the words of U.S. Attorney Dwight C. Holton, “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. . . . They will not be tolerated. ”
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This move has crippled U.S. intelligence concerning Islamic threats. Moreover, it has led to some surreal moments, when the administration’s party line—that there is absolutely no connection between Islam and violence—bumps up against reality. For example, during a congressional hearing on extremism in December 2011, the Homeland Defense department’s Paul Stockton refused to associate Islamic terrorists with Islam in any way, shape, or form, regardless of “any set of qualifiers”; he would not even agree that al-Qaeda is following a “distorted” or “perverted” version of Islam. When Representative Dan Lungren repeatedly asked Stockton if he would at least concede that al-Qaeda “is acting out violent Islamist extremism,” Stockton continued to refuse, insisting that the group merely consists of “murderers,” as a visibly stunned Lungren and others looked on.
38
A Newsmax article titled “Obama Overlooks Christian Persecution” gives more examples of State Department indifference “regarding the New Years’ murders of Coptic Christians in Egypt and the ravaging of a cathedral.” The State Department under Hillary Clinton “refused to list Egypt as ‘a country of particular concern,’ even as Christians and others were being murdered, churches destroyed, and girls kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam”—despite the fact that the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, an independent and bipartisan federal government commission, had recommended that the State Department do so.
39
Indeed, in the State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, last released in September 2011, neither Egypt nor Pakistan was among the “Countries of Particular Concern”—defined by the State Department as countries that are the “worst violators of religious freedom”—even though the State Department’s own report “stated that Pakistani law calls for the death penalty for people who commit ‘blasphemy’ against Islam or convert from Islam to another religion.” The report even actually “listed multiple instances of the Pakistani government using the law to persecute Christians”
40
—yet Pakistan still was not deemed a country of particular concern.
This is not surprising considering that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was personally responsible for classifying countries with the “of particular concern” label, believes all religions are equally prone to violence. As for Muslim violence, her biggest “worry” is that it sometimes targets other Muslims—not that it frequently targets non-Muslims:
Religions against one another, it is even within religions, within Christianity, within Judaism within, oh, Islam, within Hinduism there are people who believe their version of that religion is the only right way to believe. And so in some of the countries that we are concerned about that are majority Muslim countries
it’s the intimidation and violence against Muslims who are in minority sects that we most worry about
. [Emphasis added.]
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Indeed, Muslim clerics regularly taunt Christian minorities with the indifference—at best—of America and the West. For example, Egyptian cleric Sheikh Wagdi Ghoneim recently posted an online video in which, after accusing Egypt’s Christian Copts of playing a major role in the December 2012 protests against Islamist President Morsi, he threatened them with genocide, sarcastically adding, “What do you think—that America will protect you? Let’s be very clear, America will not protect you. If so, it would have protected the Christians of Iraq when they were being butchered! ”
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When some concerned members of Congress tried to create a special envoy for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia, and their legislation passed the House by a huge margin, Democrat senator James Webb put a hold on it and prevented it from passing.
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Before the bill died, “Representative Frank Wolf said he ‘cannot understand why’ the hold had been placed on a bill that might help Coptic Christians and other groups ‘who face daily persecution, hardship, violence, instability and even death.’” The ultimate source of opposition was the State Department, which had told Webb, “we oppose the bill as it infringes on the Secretary’s [Hillary Clinton’s] flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions,” adding that the “the new special envoy position is unnecessary, duplicative, and likely counterproductive.”
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But as Wolf responded, “If I believed that religious minorities, especially in these strategic regions, were getting the attention warranted at the State Department, I would cease in pressing for passage of this legislation. . . . Sadly, that is far from being the case. We must act now.... Time is running out. ”
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Speakers at Coptic Solidarity’s third annual conference in Washington, D.C., in June 2012—featuring several concerned lawmakers, including the United Kingdom’s Lord Alton, Senator Roy Blunt, Congressman Trent Frank, Congressman Joseph Pitts, and Frank Wolf himself
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—were clear that Hillary Clinton was ultimately behind the killing of the bill.
That conference also shed light on the fact that even outside the context of the “Arab Spring,” the position of the Obama administration has been see-no-Christian-persecution-by-Muslims. Nigerian lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe described the sheer carnage of thousands of Christians at the hands of Muslim militants and lamented that the Obama administration’s response was to pressure the Christian president of Nigeria to make more concessions—including building more mosques (the very places that “radicalize” Muslims against “infidel” Christians).
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The “Arab Spring” is not applicable to Nigeria. But despite Boko Haram’s self-declared goal of cleansing Nigeria of all Christian presence—and the countless churches intentionally bombed and burned, and thousands of Christians intentionally slaughtered, as recounted in the pages above—the Obama administration still refuses to designate the group as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO),” even as several U.S. politicians and NGOs pressure it to do so.
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BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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