Via Vlad Tepes.
17.9.11
Glick: «agressão diplomática»
Leia tudo!
Amplify’d from www.jpost.com
By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel’s expense.
As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with that country’s Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new “State of Palestine” will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian “refugees.” This is true, he said, even for the “refugees” who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian “refugees” living inside “Palestine.” As he put it, “Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority? Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans? Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN? Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this? THE PALESTINIANS have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel’s right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs – the so-called Palestinian “refugees” – as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel’s destruction.
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Duas histórias de apostasia e de como o islão viola a liberdade de consciência
Leia tudo!
Amplify’d from www.jihadwatch.org
Raymond Ibrahim: A Tale of Two Apostasies
Cases dealing with apostasy in Islam—whereby Muslims who convert to other religions are tortured and executed—are on the rise and need to be acknowledged for what they are: one of Islam’s most visible attempts to suppress the human conscience—a phenomenon that has dire implications beyond religious freedom. Consider these two recent stories. First, from Somalia:
According to a leader of the underground church: “It is usual for the al-Shabaab to decapitate those they suspect to have embraced the Christian faith, or sympathizers of western ideals. Our brother accepted the Christian faith three years ago and was determined in his faith in God. We greatly miss him.”
Likewise, it was recently revealed that a Muslim father in Uganda trapped, starved, and maimed his teenage daughter, simply because she embraced Christianity—that is, simply because she attempted to follow her conscience. When she was finally rescued six months later, she “was bony, very weak, and not able to talk or walk. Her hair had turned yellow, she had long fingernails and sunken eyes, and she looked very slim, less than 20 kilograms [44 pounds].” Details follow:
When she refused to recant, “he locked her up in a room of the semi-permanent house for six months without seeing sunlight. The younger brother was warned not to tell anyone that Susan was locked up in a room and was not given any food.”
Susan’s brother, still young and not fully indoctrinated in the things of Islam, smuggled scraps of food to his sister, though “most days she could only feed on mud”; he also dug a hole under the door, pouring water through it, which she was forced to lap “using her tongue.”
These two cases are not “aberrant” or “misrepresentative” of Islam. For starters, even if one were to accept that al-Shabaab in Somalia are “extremists,” we find that “the transitional government in Mogadishu fighting [against al-Shabaab] to retain control of the country treats Christians little better than the al-Shabaab extremists do. While proclaiming himself a moderate, President Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed has embraced a version of sharia that mandates the death penalty for those who leave Islam.”
He probably embraced this “version of sharia” as there is no other version: all four recognized schools of Muslim jurisprudence mandate death for apostates. (Meanwhile in Lala land, the New York Times advocates sharia in America.)
As for the Uganda anecdote, Susan’s father actually opted to follow the most lenient form of punishment allowed for apostasy: while Islam’s three Sunni schools of law condemn the apostate to death, the Hanafi School “progressively” advocates beating and imprisoning females until they see the “error of their ways” and return to Islam.
Likewise, though Susan’s father was arrested, he was “quickly released,” doubtless because the authorities recognized that he was only upholding Islam.
Such is the potential fate of all Muslim converts to Christianity wherever Islam is strong. Thus, a Christian pastor in Iran remains behind bars, where he is being tortured and awaits execution for refusing to recant Christianity. Even in onetime Christian Norway, a Muslim convert to Christianity was tortured with boiling water and told by fellow Muslim inmates “If you do not return to Islam, we will kill you”; if deported to his native Afghanistan, he risks death by stoning for leaving Islam (note again the agreement on the penalty for apostasy between individual “fanatics” and Muslim governments).
To all the relativists out there, they have but one question to ask themselves: where is the other religion that kills defectors? There are none; only gangs, not religions, exhibit such a “mafia” mentality—hence the argument that Islam is more a political system than a religion.
Finally, it should be noted that Islam’s suppression of individual choice is not limited to forcing Muslims in far off places to adhere to Islam; rather, the enforced denial of the human conscience in a billion or so people has negative, if unspoken, implications on a global level.
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16.9.11
A desastrada e desastrosa política de norte-americana de apaziguamento do islão
Amplify’d from pajamasmedia.com
The U.S. Government’s Failed History of Muslim Outreach Since 9/11
It is too terrible to contemplate how many more lives may eventually be sacrificed before our elected officials decide to reverse course.September 11, 2011 - 11:15 am - by Patrick Poole
When President Obama hosted his annual iftar dinner in August to commemorate Ramadan, the list of invitees published by the White House was curiously missing the names of several attendees — all of whom are top leaders of organizations known to be purveyors of jihadist ideology. But it was not like they had crashed the party. One of the unlisted, Mohamed Magid, head of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America, was photographed by Reuters sitting at the front table only a few feet from the president as he spoke.
This was just the most recent episode in the federal government’s disastrous attempts at outreach to the Muslim community since the 9/11 attacks. With the release of President Obama’s new strategic plan to combat “violent extremism” by expanding outreach to these same terror-tied groups, the present administration seems intent on compounding the problems wrought by its predecessors.
Misguided outreach activities began long before 9/11, with the best example being the case of Abdurahman Alamoudi.
Alamoudi was the conduit through which much of the U.S. government’s outreach was pursued following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Not only was he asked by the Clinton administration to help train and certify all Muslim military chaplains, his organization being the first to do so, but he also was appointed by the State Department in 1997 as a goodwill ambassador to the Middle East, making six taxpayer-funded trips. It is fair to say that during this period, Alamoudi was the most prominent and politically connected Muslim leader in America.
As we now know, Alamoudi was indicted in October 2003 for moving money on behalf of Libyan intelligence in an assassination plot targeting Saudi Prince (now King) Abdullah. The U.S. government has admitted that at the time he was being courted by Democrats and Republicans alike, he was a major fundraiser for al-Qaeda.
However, it is not as if the U.S. government was unaware of Alamoudi’s attachments. As far back as 1993, an informant told the FBI that Alamoudi was funneling regular payments from Osama bin Laden to Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh” who was convicted of authorizing terror attacks against New York landmarks. In March 1996, Alamoudi’s association with Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook was exposed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Two years later, the State Department came under fire by the New York Post for inviting Alamoudi to official events despite his known remarks in support of terrorism and terrorist leaders.
When President Bush took office, Alamoudi was quickly courted by the new administration. In June 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that Alamoudi was going to be part of a White House meeting with Vice President Cheney despite the fact that Alamoudi was known to have attended a terror confab in Beirut earlier that year featuring representatives from virtually every major Islamic terrorist organization in the world, including al-Qaeda.
Yet just days after the 9/11 attacks, Alamoudi was one of the Muslim leaders asked to appear with President Bush at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. That same week, one of Alamoudi’s close associates, Muzammil Siddiqi, was asked to deliver an Islamic prayer and to represent the entire Muslim-American community at the national prayer service mourning the fallen.
The inclusion of Alamoudi and Siddiqi at the post-9/11 events was highly criticized, especially because Alamoudi had been videotaped in October 2000, as noted by the Los Angeles Times, expressing his support for Hamas and Hezbollah at a rally held just steps from the White House. At that same demonstration, Siddiqi accused the U.S. of responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians and warned that “the wrath of God will come.” One former Secret Service agent told Fox News that “the intelligence community has known for some time the association of Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi and Mr. Alamoudi and their association with terrorist organizations.”
The decision to continue doing business with Alamoudi and others like him was just one of many blunders made by the U.S. government in its eagerness to conduct Muslim outreach in the wake of 9/11.
Most embarrassing of all, one of the first Muslim leaders to whom the government turned after the attacks was none other than Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda cleric who was in direct contact with at least three of the 9/11 hijackers and is currently on the CIA’s kill-or-capture list.
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Obama apela à denúncia orwelliana
Desespero?
Amplify’d from townhall.com
AttackWatch.com is the Administration's Latest Propaganda Arm
President Obama's official re-election campaign has set up a website ostensibly to defend him against false attacks, but its obvious purpose is to smear Republicans and propagandize. What could be more shameless??
Jim Messina, Obama's re-election campaign manager, in a fundraising email announcing the website, said: "Forming the first line of defense against a barrage of misinformation won't be easy. Our success will depend on a team of researchers and writers to stay on the lookout for false claims about the President and his record, bring you the facts, and hold our opposition accountable."?
Does any rational person believe these people anymore? They trade in lies and misinformation, and the only chance they have to re-elect Obama -- and it's still slim -- is to grossly distort Obama's record and fabricate fantasies about his opposition.?
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Egipto: jornalistas ocidentais atacados pela turba
Por que razão os jornalistas ocidentais não dão conta do ataque de turbas islâmicas aos seus colegas? Qual é a sua missão? Dar notícias ou divulgar informação que dê uma boa imagem da «primavera árabe» e reter a informação que expõe o seu lado negro e incompreensível para quem é ignorante do islão?
Amplify’d from www.amnation.com
Among the reporters who narrowly escaped serious injury or death was Margaret Warner of The News Hour. Do you believe, after the near-killing of Lara Logan last February, that Western media would send a mousy little female like Warner into the maelstrom of Muslim Egypt? Of course you believe it. Female equality uber alles. Female equality unto death.
Angry crowd turns on journalists reporting embassy attack in EgyptCairo--An angry crowd lingering near the Israeli embassy in Cairo after an attack on the building a day earlier turned on journalists reporting the incident Saturday, accusing at least one of being an Israeli spy.
As a CNN crew filmed the embassy from across the street, another crew from American public television--led by Egyptian television producer Dina Amer--approached the building.
The crew's Russian cameraman was preparing to film the embassy when a woman in the crowd began hurling insults at the TV team, Amer said.
"There was this older lady who decided to follow me and rally people against me," Amer recalled.
"She said 'you're a spy working with the Americans.' Then they swarmed me and I was a target."
A growing crowd surrounded Amer and her colleagues, as they tried to leave the scene.
Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, a producer working for CNN, rushed to help escort Amer through the angry crowd. But suddenly the two reporters were pinned against the railing of an overpass by young men who were accusing Amer of being an Israeli spy.
Yelling "I'm Egyptian," Fahmy managed to pull Amer another 10 meters down the road, until the pressure from the mob overwhelmed the pair.
Amer screamed as she and Fahmy were knocked to the ground and the crowd started to trample them.
Other CNN journalists tried to reach in to help, but were pushed back by a wall of angry men.
Fahmy lay on top of Amer, shielding her with his body.
"I was thinking, how powerless I was because there was no police to save us," Fahmy said. "I was worried that they were going to rape her."
At that moment, a student bystander named Mohammed el Banna called out to the journalists and pointed out a nearby car.
Somehow, Fahmy managed to carry Amer to the open door of the public television crew's car, where two of her female colleagues were waiting just a few feet away.
The mob pounded on the windows and tried to reach into the vehicle as the panicked reporters fumbled and struggled to get behind the steering wheel.
When Margaret Warner, a correspondent with the PBS program "Newshour" managed to get the vehicle moving away from the crowd, men threw stones at the departing vehicle.
Amer had few words to describe the terrifying ordeal.
"They were animals," she said.
Other Egyptian journalists told CNN they were also attacked Saturday while trying to report near the Israeli embassy.
Ahmed Aleiba, a correspondent with Egyptian state television, said he was pursued by civilians and soldiers.
"I had to run because obviously they were targeting journalists," Aleiba said in a phone call with CNN. "They attacked two other TV crews."
"I was in the car getting ready to film. A soldier knocked on the window with his stick and said 'if you don't leave by midnight your car will be destroyed,"" said Farah Saafan, a video journalist with the English-language newspaper Daily News Egypt.
Journalists have been targeted before in Cairo.
On February 2, dozens of journalists of different nationalities were beaten and pursued around the city while trying to report on pro-Mubarak demonstrations. The day descended into one of brutal street violence, as pro-regime supporters backed by men on horses and camels attacked opposition demonstrators on what became known as the "Battle of the Camel."
And CBS News correspondent Lara Logan suffered a brutal sexual assault in Tahrir Square while covering the celebrations that followed former President Hosni Mubarak's resignation on February 11.
On Saturday, as some journalists ran for their lives from the Israeli Embassy, the interim government was holding crisis talks with Egypt's ruling military council and top intelligence chief.
The emergency session concluded with a pledge to honor Egypt's international treaties and defend foreign embassies. The government also announced plans to re-activate the country's 30-year-old emergency law.
Application of the law had lapsed since the overthrow of Mubarak, according to a senior official in the National Security Directorate, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.
One of the five measures announced after Saturday's crisis talks calls on authorities to make "media and political powers accountable for inciting security lapses."
"It's obvious that there is some sort of plan leading to military rule in this country," warned Egyptian state TV's Aleiba. "The next step will be martial law."
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Jihad na Tailândia
A matar infiéis desde 622.
Amplify’d from www.jihadwatch.org
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15.9.11
Canadá: mulher mata filho recém-nascido e apanha 4 anos de pena suspensa
Amplify’d from pajamasmedia.com
A 1996 exhibit in Washington DC featured the remains of an Incan child sacrifice.
The title isn’t fair — in Canada infanticide is a serious crime that can land you a tough five year sentence. That’s five years maximum, by the way. After all, it’s only killing a baby, nothing people need to really be punished for doing.
People in Canada who think killing an infant is the act of a morally bankrupt monster who deserves more time than the average murderer are getting another kick in the teeth, courtesy of Judge Joanne Veit. She let a woman convicted of murdering her newborn baby then throwing the body over her neighbor’s backyard fence walk out of court with a suspended sentence and probation.
According to Veit the murderess is the victim:
Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit rejected the Crown’s call for a four-year prison term — which she described as “essentially” seeking the maximum five-year punishment when taking into account the time Effert has already spent behind bars and under strict bail conditions.
Based on the fact infanticide has not been struck from the Criminal Code and it has no minimum penalty, Veit said she feels Canadians “understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support.
“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother,” said Veit.
I’m sure. The mother in question is Katrina Effert. In 2005, she gave birth to the child alone in her parent’s basement and when the baby started to cry, she strangled the boy with a pair of thong underwear and threw his body into her neighbor’s yard. When police investigated after finding the boy’s body, she initially claimed she was a virgin, but when caught in that lie she told cops she had given the baby to her boyfriend.
She strangled her newborn baby, threw the body into her neighbor’s yard, and then tried to frame her boyfriend for the murder. She did all this because, at 19, she was hiding her pregnancy from her mother.
During her first trial her behavior — specifically her attempts to cover up the crime and frame an innocent man — was used by prosecutors to show this wasn’t “infanticide” but murder. In Canada, infanticide is assumed to be the product of a temporary mental illness – brought on by having a baby or by that mind-searing horror we call lactation. In Canada a woman commits infanticide if she murders a newborn before she has “recovered” from the effects of child birth, a process billions of women were able to handle for millions of years without losing their sanity.
In that first trial, Effert was sentenced to life in prison. But her defense lawyers appealed and we have this ruling, in which a judge very cavalierly suggests that Canadians should be grieving for the mother as well as for the helpless child who was murdered with a pair of thong panties and dumped like a bag of garbage into some unsuspecting neighbor’s backyard. Obviously many people in the pro-life movement see this as the natural progression of a culture that wholeheartedly accepts the most liberal positions on abortion. And they may have a point:
Pro-life advocates have warned for years that widespread acceptance of abortion will open the door to greatersocietal acceptance of infanticide, beginning with the euthanizing of disabled newborns. Infanticide proponent Peter Singer, a top ethicist at Princeton University, has said, for example, “there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby.”
Though he once was considered to be on the radical fringe, Singer’s views are becoming more mainstream. For example, the world’s most prestigious bioethics journal, The Hastings Center Report, published in 2008 an enthusiastic defense of the Netherlands’ practice of euthanizing newborns.
However, it is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse to assume that acceptance of abortion is the driving factor in the culture of death Canada and the United States have both developed over the years. Canada’s acceptance of late-term abortions is a symptom of a much deeper problem, one that also leads to a criminal justice system that gives women who murder newborns slaps on the wrist.
Leftism sanctions and encourages criminality by changing societal views of criminals and victims. We see this clearly when Veit speaks of the onerousness of childbirth, as if the child is a parasite erupting from the womb of some innocent victim in a scene slightly less gory than the chest bursting dinner scene in Alien. Meanwhile, Veit presumes to speak for all Canadians when she claims they grieve for Effert, the woman who strangled a baby and then tried to frame an innocent man for the murder.
Collectivist ideology sees people as essentially interchangeable; they do not accept the idea that a child’s life is more precious than an adult’s. The Western leftist tradition also sees all people as victims and criminality as an expression not of moral weakness or lack of character, but of frustration and lack of opportunity. Canada, with its much beloved welfare state and universal health care, still wasn’t doing enough for poor Katrina Effert and that’s why she killed her son. It has nothing to do with selfishness, immorality, or evil.
For the left, “income inequality” causes crime and the criminal is actually a victim of an unfair and unjust system created by the only true evil in the world: Western civilization. More than 5,000 years of philosophy and moral tradition has led to the West being (until recently) the light in a benighted world. In a little less than 200 years, Karl Marx and his spiritual heirs have overturned those traditions and now we are a people who slap the wrists of child murderers while supposedly grieving for them. Now we blame the newborn for his murder by insinuating that his birth was such an ordeal it literally drove the mother mad.
About eight years ago I took a class in Meso-American art with an archeologist who had two decades in the field under his belt. One of the things I learned was that in some of those famous pyramid temples each corner had a sacrificed infant placed under the foundation. The first Europeans to come into contact with the Aztecs were rightly disgusted by people who killed their own children in religious ceremonies. Now their descendants suspend the sentences of child killers who didn’t want to get in trouble with their parents.
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Palestina judenrein
Qual seria a reacção se um embaixador israelita defende-se a expulsão dos árabes de Israel, para fortalecer a identidade nacional?
Amplify’d from www.jihadwatch.org
“Well, I personally still believe that as a first step we need to be totally separated, and we can contemplate these issues in the future,” he said when asked by The Daily Caller if he could imagine a Jew being elected mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah in a future independent Palestinian state. “But after the experience of 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it will be in the best interests of the two peoples to be separated first.”
Last year, Areikat made a similar statement during an interview with Tablet magazine. Asked whether it would be neccessary to transfer and remove “every Jew” from a future Palestinian state, Areikat responded “absolutely.”
“I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state,” he said then. “I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.”...
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Começa julgamento do «Jihadista das Cuecas»
Alguém se lembra do zeloso muçulmano que tentou destruir um avião detonando explosivos escondidos nas cuecas no dia de Natal de 2009?
Amplify’d from www.jihadwatch.org
"Underwear bomber shouts 'Osama's alive' as he enters court during jury selection," by Tresa Baldas and David Ashenfelter for the Detroit Free Press, September 14:
“Osama’s alive,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab shouted as he entered a courtroom in Detroit this morning. “I’m forced to wear prison clothes.”
Abdulmutallab, wearing khaki prison pants, a white t-shirt and black skull cap, refused to stand when U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds, who was another room with prospective jurors, asked him to stand with others in her courtroom several floors away.
While Edmunds briefed jurors about the allegations against him Abdulmutallab hollered “jihad” and stared at the ceiling when she told jurors about the alleged plot to blow up the plane with a bomb in his underware [sic].
During most of the 25-minute jury instruction, Abdulmutallab sat at the defense table with his standby lawyer, Anthony Chambers, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped under his chin. At one point, he put his foot on the defense table.
Federal marshals stood over him while he misbehaved. The prospective jurors could observe his antics on a two-way closed circuit television monitor. [...]
After instructing the jury and leaving them to fill out a questionnaire, Edmunds planned to return to her courtroom to hear Abdulmutallab – who is representing himself – argue for his release, claiming he’s being unlawfully detailed [sic] by the U.S. government, and that he’s been subjected to excessive force while being held at the federal prison in Milan.
In court documents filed last month, Abdulmutallab asked the court to release him from prison, arguing that "all Muslims should only be ruled by the law of the Quran."
But Edmunds denied his request.[...]
In September, Abdulmutallab fired his government-appointed lawyers and suggested that he wanted to plead guilty to some charges. He has said nothing about a plea since.
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«Sionistas responsáveis pelas duas grandes guerras»
Que pena estas iluminadoras palavras não terem sido pronunciadas na entrevista à RTP. Que orgulho sentiria a jornalista e os responsáveis da estação por serem veículo destas revelações tão esclarecedoras.
Amplify’d from www.jihadwatch.org
"Ahmadinejad: Zionists started both world wars," by Yitzhak Benhorin for YNet News, September 14:
WASHINGTON – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Israel of perpetuating terror, and blamed the "Zionist regime" for starting both the first and second world wars."The Zionist regime is always doing the same thing. They destroy people’s homes and raze them to the ground," Ahmadinejad told the Washington Post on Tuesday. "They have created a few major wars. They continue to assassinate and terrorize people; they continue their policy of coercion against other nations, including Iran."
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13.9.11
Conclusões a tirar da tomada da embaixada israelita no Egipto
Amplify’d from www.jpost.com
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Cristãos abandonam cristãos do mundo islâmico
Destaque:
«I am not a Catholic – indeed, I am not even a believer (...). But in recent years it has become increasingly difficult not to notice a failing at the heart of the Catholic – indeed the whole Christian – world’s outlook. Years of intimidation, thuggery and violence have succeeded in silencing criticism not only of Islam but of violence committed in the name of Islam against Christians. This now amounts to one of the great moral failings of our time.»
Amplify’d from www.catholicherald.co.uk
It is five years now since Pope Benedict gave his celebrated address at Regensburg on faith and reason. Deeply thought and beautifully expressed, it is largely remembered for neither of these things. Rather, it is remembered for a single line in which Pope Benedict quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor making a disobliging remark about the way in which Islam is spread by violence.
Benedict XVI did not say that he agreed with the line. Indeed, he went out of his way before quoting it to distance himself from it, remarking, among other things, on its “brusqueness”. But this was to no avail.
Around the world, political and religious leaders in Muslim majority countries demanded apologies and threatened repercussions. More striking was the impact on the ground. Across what President Obama calls “the Muslim world”, there were protests and attacks against Christians and Christian sites. In the Palestinian areas and elsewhere churches were attacked and Christians targeted. In the Somali capital, Mogadishu, an Italian nun was shot and killed in an Islamist ambush at a hospital.
By 2006, so soon after the Danish cartoons controversy, the world had got used to this. And it expected the inevitable stand-down. Within days the Pope was effectively forced to issue an unprecedented apology.
Culturally and civilisationally, the aftermath of Regensburg was a far greater disaster than the mass-murder in New York and Washington 10 years ago this same month. Such successful intimidation of the head of the Catholic Church by elements of the Islamic faith has had a palpable effect, all but silencing the rightful concern of Christians for their co-religionists.
I am not a Catholic – indeed, I am not even a believer– but I have great respect for the current Pope and for many activities of the Catholic Church worldwide. But in recent years it has become increasingly difficult not to notice a failing at the heart of the Catholic – indeed the whole Christian – world’s outlook. Years of intimidation, thuggery and violence have succeeded in silencing criticism not only of Islam but of violence committed in the name of Islam against Christians. This now amounts to one of the great moral failings of our time.
Not a week, in fact not a day, goes by when Christians are not somewhere in the world the victims of Islamist violence. You can pluck a week, any week, and the story is the same: burnings, lootings, rapes, murders. Every one of the most degrading and terrifying things that one group of people can perform on another is performed by Islamists against Christians.
At the very start of this year, in the once-wonderful city of Alexandria, the Egyptian Coptic Christian community were the target of a massive car bomb placed outside their church as they left New Year’s Eve Mass. Twenty-three worshippers were killed and almost 100 injured.
At Easter this year it was once again Christians in Iraq who were targeted. This time it was a bomb at the Catholic church of the Sacred Heart in Baghdad. Every day the same, or similar, stories occur. Persecution of Christians is so routine that in much of the western press it rarely even appears as “News in Brief” material.
Just this month so far, the Iranian authorities finally released a Christian they have had in detention for 359 days. His “crime”? He was accused of spreading Christianity and of having ties with Christian organisations. As Muslim leaders around the world continue to campaign at the United Nations and elsewhere to try to make illegal – and punishable – any criticism of Islam, restrictions of the rights of Christians continue unnoticed. The government of Kazakhstan is this month preparing to introduce a new law further limiting the rights of Christians.
In other countries often described as “allies” of this one, the rights of Christians are already formally and informally deemed of no significance. Just a few days ago two Pakistani Christians were beaten with iron rods and left for dead by a group of young Muslim men because they refused to convert to Islam. As in many other countries, Christians in Pakistan are regularly threatened with death for so-called “apostasy” or “blasphemy”. Last month a Christian girl was reportedly tortured and sexually abused after refusing to convert, while a 38-year-old Christian was shot dead in a Christian suburb.
Across the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and much of Africa, wherever Christians are in a minority and Muslims in a majority, Christians are subjected to oppression, murder and violence. In Somalia the terrorist group al-Shabaab is attempting to carry out a genocide against the Christians of Somalia. Similar efforts are ongoing in Nigeria and elsewhere. In other places the effort to “religiously cleanse” whole areas of Christians is more subtle. In Bethlehem the local Christian community has been decimated. Not by the Israelis, but by Palestinian Muslims. Since the Palestinian Authority took control of Bethlehem 16 years ago the local Christians have gone from a majority to a minority community. It is a familiar pattern. Around the region I have spoken to many of these victims. I have heard their stories and seen their tears. And the same question always occurs. The world is often unconcerned. But why are their fellow Christians not doing anything?
There are of course some Christian organisations – notably the wonderful Barnabas Fund – which persist in trying to raise awareness and assist persecuted Christians. But the cause is one of the most unpopular and unacknowledged of our day.
After the bombing in Alexandria at New Year, tenuously, carefully, the Pope expressed concern not only for the Copts of Egypt, but also for the Muslims of Egypt. From the leading imam of Egypt this drew a swift response. The Pope was accused of “bias” and “unacceptable interference in the affairs of Egypt”.
This has become one of the librettos of our time. And it is high time that it changed.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1ctb5
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