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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (39 page)

BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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Instead, in May 2012, the administration agreed to spend $600 million on a USAID initiative launched to ascertain the “true causes” behind Boko Haram’s jihad
49
—as if the organization has not been perfectly clear about its goals: the enforcement of Sharia law and elimination (or at least subjugation) of all infidels, chief among them Christians. The group has voiced its Islamic supremacism countless times and under many formulations. For example, in August 2012, Boko Haram leader Abu Bakar Shekau appeared on video ordering Nigeria’s Christian president Good-luck Jonathan to “repent and forsake Christianity,” that is, convert to Islam; otherwise the jihad—which began in earnest after Jonathan, a Christian, won Nigeria’s fairest presidential elections to date—would continue.
50
The fact that Boko Haram’s motives are clear-cut and obviously religious (according to Sharia, a non-Muslim like Jonathan may not rule over Muslims) has not stopped the Obama administration from pointing to anything and everything else to explain the violence in Nigeria. The very next day after Boko Haram bombed Christian churches celebrating Easter in April 2012, killing dozens, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson stressed that “religion is not driving extremist violence either in Jos or northern Nigeria [where churches were and continue to be bombed].”
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As far as former U.S. president Bill Clinton is concerned, “inequality” and “poverty” are “what’s fueling all this stuff”—a reference to Boko Haram’s jihad to enforce Sharia and eliminate Christians. Clinton further called on Nigerians to “embrace their similarities,” adding, “It is almost impossible to cure a problem based on violence with violence”
52
—apparently a suggestion that Nigeria’s government not retaliate with any severity in response to Boko Haram’s mass murderers.
There is a final point to be made concerning Barrack Hussein Obama, the man. Based on his own personal background—an education in the Islamic schools or
madrassas
53
of Indonesia and a Muslim father from Kenya, both of which nations have figured prominently in this book—he of all U.S. presidents should be more sensitive to, or at least more cognizant of, the realities of Christian suffering under Islam. And yet, of all U.S. presidents, his policies have done the most not only to ignore but to enable their suffering, especially through his unqualified support for Islamists in the guise of the “Arab Spring,” which former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called “such a total grotesque failure,” correctly referring to it as an “anti-Christian spring.”
54
The same mainstream media obfuscation of and governmental indifference to the Muslim persecution of Christians also prevails in Europe. In October 2011, Ann Widdecombe, a conservative British politician, criticized the U.K.’s obvious double standard: “David Cameron’s government have threatened to cut the overseas aid budget for countries which persecute homosexuals.... Fair enough. But what about Christians? When do we qualify for such protection or don’t we? . . . You stand a better chance of earnest representation [in the U.K.] if you are a hedgehog [than a Christian].” Among other things, she pointed out that U.K. aid to Pakistan—where countless Christian and other minorities are imprisoned on (mostly false) charges of “blasphemy”—will double even as the U.K. cut aid to Malawi because “two homosexual men were sentenced to 14 years of hard labor” there.
55
The United Nations’ assiduous avoidance of any talk of Christian persecution has also occasioned some surreal moments. In July 2012, for example, Fox News reported, “The UN’s newest candidate to sit on the Human Rights Council is led by an African strongman accused of genocide by the world body’s top war crimes court. Sudan, led by President Omar al-Bashir [responsible for a genocide that saw millions killed in Khartoum’s bid to enforce Sharia law], is set to join what the UN bills as its foremost arbiter of human rights abuses, in just the latest absurd example of the [
sic
] a UN selection process that repeatedly places rogue states in global leadership positions.” As one observer pointed out, “‘Electing Sudan to the UN body mandated to promote and protect human rights worldwide is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter. . . . But it’s the way the UN works.’”
56
The mainstream media and the Western political establishment have shown themselves unable or unwilling to accept the admitted motivation of Islamic groups around the world—namely, the establishment of Sharia, which is distinctly hostile to non-Muslims. They are simply unable to factor ideological, religious, or existential motives into their thinking about violence around the world. Instead they see only material motives (money, land, politics, and so forth). Their almost instinctive conclusion is that Muslim violence is proof positive of legitimate Muslim grievance. These attitudes are so ingrained that they have eroded the influence of Western civilization and its capacity to act.
But is this true of Western Christians, as well? Are they also part of this paradigm—blind or indifferent to the sufferings of their coreligionists around the world? While it might be expected that secular media and politicians would turn a blind eye to Christian persecution, are Western Christians also indifferent?
Some Western Christians, to be sure, do sympathize with their fellow Christians living under the threat of Muslim violence. Western Christians of all denominations do seek to ameliorate this growing humanitarian crisis. And considering that nearly 80 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians,
57
they are in a very strong position to influence the sort of policies their elected representatives enact.
Yet this crisis is a priority for only a small minority of American Christians. It seems that by and large Christians in the U.S. accept the mainstream narrative. They hear the same message that is drummed into the ears of all Americans—that historically Christians are the intolerant group, responsible for untold sufferings around the world, and they should take the log out of their own eye before they presume to take the speck out of their brother’s. Such a misreading of the situation has clearly infiltrated and contaminated the worldview of many American Christians, and particularly of their leaders, causing them either not to see or to be embarrassed to talk about the reality of global Christian persecution. According to a November 2011 survey, while three out of four American Christians have expressed a desire to learn more about the persecuted church, half of America’s pastors refuse to mention it.
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When German chancellor Angela Merkel stated the fact that Christianity is “the most persecuted religion worldwide,” she was strongly condemned by many lawmakers and even human rights organizations.
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The pressure to refrain from mentioning uncomfortable facts about the persecution of Christians is enormous. Little wonder that so many Christian leaders are reluctant to speak about persecution, even when most of their flock wish to hear about it.
Even something as minimal as instituting a short prayer for persecuted Christians, a practice that would at least increase awareness of the situation, is shunned. After all, such a prayer would raise uncomfortable questions—such as who is primarily behind this persecution, and why—that few American Christian leaders want to confront. Commenting on the general lethargy and apathy that reigns in many American Christian churches, Open Doors USA president Dr. Carl Moeller recently said,
We would think of the American church as a napping church and that we would elbow it and it would wake up and rouse itself and do something [about the persecution of Christians]. . . . In my mind today, the picture I have is a church in a diabetic coma that has gorged itself on the sweets of affluence, materialism, and the idolatry of worshipping the materialistic world. That diabetic coma is now life threatening. We as a church are at the point of death—not the church in the Middle East. We are the ones who can no longer rouse ourselves to even pray for an hour on behalf of things that God would have us pray for.
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Some have suggested that American Protestants and Catholics are indifferent to the sufferings of persecuted Christians around the world because of sectarian differences—because they do not see such Christians as Christians. This argument overlooks the fact that, while most indigenous Christians in the Middle East are Orthodox, the majority of the 100 million Christians (at least) being persecuted around the world are either Protestant or Catholic. As a matter of fact, many of them belong to Christian populations whom Protestant and Catholic missionaries from the West originally proselytized. Sadly, we have a situation where Western Christians go to Islamic lands, convert Muslims to Christianity, and then turn their backs on them when they get persecuted for being Christians. In any case, all sectarian and semantic differences aside, all Christians around the world are suffering first and foremost for their belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God—the cornerstone of all Christian theology, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.
In fact, the argument that American Christians are indifferent to the sufferings of global Christians because of sectarian differences is wholly invalid. After all, American Christians habitually evoke the human rights of non-Christians—particularly non-Christians for whom the mainstream media has approved the status of “persecuted”—even when these same non-Christians themselves persecute the Christian minorities in their midst. For example, in October 2012, fifteen leaders from U.S. Christian denominations—mostly Protestant, including the Lutherans, the Methodists, and the United Church of Christ, denominations that rarely if ever mention Christian persecution—asked Congress to reevaluate U.S. military aid to Israel, since “military aid will only serve to sustain the status quo and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories.” In other words, U.S. military aid will contribute to the oppression of the Palestinians, most of whom are Muslims, and some of whom persecute the Christian minorities in their midst.
In response, the American Jewish Committee, “outraged by the Christian leaders’ call,” got it right when they pointed out that, at a time “When religious liberty and safety of Christians across the Middle East are threatened by the repercussions of the Arab Spring, these Christian leaders have chosen to initiate a polemic against Israel, a country that protects religious freedom and expression for Christians, Muslims and others.”
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It is simply not popular to talk about Christian persecution—even from the pulpits of America’s churches. Better to express Christian compassion for anyone and everyone other than fellow Christians. Just as most liberal Americans strive to disassociate themselves from their European heritage—seeing it as the root of all evil, eagerly championing the rights of non-whites—many liberal American Christians also strive to disassociate themselves from their Christian heritage, eagerly championing the rights of anyone and everyone other than their coreligionists. Hence Americans are concerned for Muslim Palestinians—even as the few remaining Christians under Palestinian Authority continue to be oppressed, especially by Hamas.
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Even so, there is one urgent reason that the West in its entirety—Christians and non-Christians, liberals and conservatives, deists and atheists—should take note of and respond to Muslim persecution of Christians:
it is a reflection of what Islam has in store for them
. While this book has focused on Christians under Islam, there should be no mistake that the same treatment is in store for
all
non-Muslims wherever and whenever Muslims achieve hegemony. Christians are only the most obvious victims, for the various reasons discussed earlier—including that they are the largest religious minority group under Islam, and the most prone to fall afoul of Islam’s laws against basic human freedoms. Fundamentally, however, the sufferings of such Christians are a reflection of Islam’s global approach to non-Muslims under its control—a reminder of how Islam behaves when it is in power, on its own home turf, untrammeled by outside influences.
BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
12.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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