Author: Robert Spencer
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: August 3, 2009
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35788
On Saturday, a frenzied mob of three thousand
Muslims stormed the tiny Pakistani Christian village of Gojra. Enflamed by
(unconfirmed) charges that a Christian had burned pages of the Qur'an, the
mob burned down fifty homes, burned eight Christians alive, and wounded twenty
others. Thousands of Christians fled the area.
Last Thursday, enraged by the same report
of blasphemy, another Muslim mob torched seventy-five Christian homes, along
with two churches, in Koriyan, a village near Gojra.
Muslims are not persecuting Christians only
in Pakistan. On July 18, Muslims in Alexandria, Egypt kidnapped a sixteen-year-old
Christian girl, Amira Markos, while she was on her way to work. Shortly thereafter
her mother received a phone call: "At 10 o'clock of the same morning
someone called me and asked if I was Amira's mother. He introduced himself
as Sheikh Mohammed, and said that my daughter is fine and will convert to
Islam. When I cried and begged him to let me have my daughter back, he said
he would let me see her again after her conversion to Islam, and ended the
call."
Amira's mother went to a local mosque, where
matters got even worse. A Muslim sheikh told her: "Listen, mother of
Amira, I am warning you not to report the abduction to the police or do anything,
the price will be your son Meena [a nine-year-old boy] being slaughtered in
front of your own eyes. I am not threatening, I'm talking seriously. Listen,
your daughter Amira will convert to Islam next Friday, and we are now preparing
her for that. Now go home and stay indoors until everything is quietly over."
This is nothing new. The leader of Egypt's
Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III, said in 2004: "I have received so many
letters about what's happening to the Christian girls who go to supermarket
stores to shop. At the store they tell them that they have won and have to
go upstairs to receive their award or prize. After that we don't know what's
happening to these girls upstairs. We don't know where they took the girls.
They could be anywhere." They most likely have been taken to places where
they can be pressured to convert to Islam.
Explained Wilfred Wong of the Jubilee Campaign,
a Christian human rights group: "The attempts to force Christians to
convert to Islam in Egypt are on the increase and the methods are getting
increasingly varied and well organized." These efforts "are being
conducted by well funded groups. It is common for money to be offered to Christians
to convert to Islam...but it also common for intimidation and force, including
kidnapping and the threat or use of rape to be adopted as a method of making
Christians convert to Islam. Christian women and girls are especially vulnerable
to these attacks and the Egyptian authorities do nothing to protect the Christians.
The Egyptian police even order the families of kidnapped Christian women to
forget about their daughters and not to try to get them back."
From where does the Islamic animus toward
Christians come? Certainly Islamic jihadists despise Christians based on Qur'anic
imperatives -- verses that say that those who "call Christ the son of
Allah" are under "Allah's curse" (9:30), and that command Muslims
to "fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day...(even if
they are) of the People of the Book" -- that is, primarily Jews and Christians
(9:29). Islamic apologists in the West assure non-Muslims that Muslims do
not take such passages literally today, yet the daily news contradicts them.
Muslims in far too many areas of the world are growing increasingly less tolerant
toward their non-Muslim neighbors.
Destruction of lives and property over unsubstantiated
charges that would be trivial even if they were substantiated. Kidnapping
and forced conversion. Yet these incidents have received only scant attention
in the mainstream media. And not only the international media, but also the
human rights establishment and the United Nations, continue to take no notice.
In their conceptual framework, only Westerners can do evil, and Christians
cannot possibly play the role of victim. The sooner the world casts off these
Leftist/jihadist fantasies, the better off we'll all be. But there are no
signs that such an awakening will take place anytime soon, if ever.
- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history,
theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight
books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic
terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect
Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest
book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns
or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.
