170 Mary Abdelmassih, “Muslims Attack Christian Village in Egypt—1 Murdered, Homes Looted and Torched,” Assyrian International News Agency, August 9, 2011, http://www.aina.org/news/2011089052824.htm .
175 For example, in December 2011, a “Montreal suburb has decided to remove a nativity scene and menorah from town hall rather than acquiesce to demands from a Muslim group to erect Islamic religious symbols,” http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/12/05/19070881.html . Contrast this with Iran, where many churches were “ordered to cancel Christmas and New Year’s celebrations as a show of their compliance and support” for “the two month-long mourning activities of the Shia’ Moslems,” a reference to the bloody flagellations and self mutilations Shias perform in memory of Imam Hussein during Ashura, http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2011/s11120044.htm . Likewise, the University of London held a Christmas service featuring readings from the Koran—Islam’s holy book that unequivocally condemns the Incarnation, which is precisely what Christmas celebrates, http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2011/12/royal-holloway-college-holds-islamic.html . Meanwhile, Muslims were issuing the usual fatwas banning other Muslims from even saying “Merry Christmas.”
PART FIVE: SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL
1 Raymond Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 179. Ayman Zawahiri, discussing what the medieval Islamic hero would do to Americans if he was alive, says “Had Saladin vanquished them [today], he would have put them to the sword!” See also 251 and 254.
2 Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 199.
3 Adel Guindy, Hikayat al-Ihtilal , [Stories of the Occupation: Correcting Misunderstandings] (Cairo: Middle East Freedom Forum, 2009), 88–89, translation by the author.
4 Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 236.
9 Raymond Ibrahim, “The Jihad on Egypt’s Pharonic Antiquities,” Raymond Ibrahim: Islam Translated, November 14, 2012, http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/the-jihad-on-egypts-pharaonic-antiquities/ . History is laden with examples of Muslims destroying their own pre-Islamic heritage—starting with Muhammad himself, who ransacked Arabia’s Ka’ba temple, transforming it into a mosque. But destroying the mountain-like pyramids was no small task in the pre-modern period—even though many early Muslim leaders certainly tried, some partially successfully; after gunfire was invented, Egypt’s medieval Mamluk rulers even managed to “de-nose” the Sphinx during target practice (though popular legend naturally attributes it to a Westerner, Napoleon). Now, however, as Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sheikhs” observed when congratulating Morsi on his presidential victory, and thanks to modern technology, the pyramids can be destroyed, just as the historic Buddha statues were destroyed by the Taliban.
10 The passage is worth quoting at length: “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of the late twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up one fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization.... Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards” (256).
11 Raymond Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 216.
30 “Dalia Mogahed succeeds in canceling meeting between Patriarch and Obama by order of Muslim Brotherhood leaders,” el-Nashra , November 22, 2011, http://www.elnashra.com/news/show/398043/ , translation by the author.