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Contents:
With ISIS an Hour Away, One of the Only Remaining Christian Communities Makes its ‘Last Stand in Iraq’: Matthew Fisher, National Post, Oct. 5, 2014 — With extremists flying the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham less than an hour down the road, the future of one of the last Christian communities in the Middle East is at grave risk of assimilation or annihilation.
Holy Land: The Perils Facing Christians: Pierre Rehov, Gatestone Institute, Sept. 27, 2014—If you ask anyone in the Middle East the meaning of the saying, " First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people," he will answer with a smile: "First, we will get rid of those who pray on Saturday, and then we will get rid of those who pray on Sunday."
Raped and Slaughtered: Muslim Persecution of Christians: Raymond Ibrahim, Frontpage, Sept. 10, 2014— From one end of the Islamic world to the other, the abduction and rape of Christian girls at the hands of Muslims—both terrorists and laymen—was a dominant theme in April.
Instructions from Prophet Muhammad on the Care and Feeding of Christians: Paul Merkley, Bayview Review, Sept. 26, 2014 — As the political scene in the Middle East becomes increasingly crowded and confused, only one theme (it seems to me) becomes ever clearer, even though it is among the least discussed in our midst.
Top Church Destroying Countries: Tom Olago, Prophecy News Watch, Aug. 28, 2014
How Christians are Persecuted in the PA: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, Sept. 30, 2014
Alarmed by Regional Threat, Lebanon’s Christians Take Up Arms: Bassem Mroue & Zeina Karam, Globe & Mail, Sept. 5, 2014
ISIS Wants to Provoke a Crusade: Christopher Dickey, Daily Beast, Aug. 18, 2014
WITH ISIS AN HOUR AWAY, ONE OF THE ONLY REMAINING CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES MAKES ITS ‘LAST STAND IN IRAQ’
Matthew Fisher
National Post, Oct. 5, 2014
With extremists flying the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham less than an hour down the road, the future of one of the last Christian communities in the Middle East is at grave risk of assimilation or annihilation. An estimated 100,000 Iraqi Christians fled the Plain of Mosul in several panicked waves that began in June as ISIS swept east from the Syrian border, murdering, raping and kidnapping as it went. Every place ISIS conquered, it immediately issued an ultimatum to Christians that repeated the stark choice they had given to Syrian Christians when they seized large parts of that country during the past two years. Christians had to either pay a huge ransom for their freedom, convert to Islam or be killed.
“After being here for more than a millennium, this is the Christians’ last stand in Iraq,” said Safa Jamel Bahnan, who used to work as a truck driver at the Mosul airport. “Over the centuries we have faced the sword so many times for our beliefs. In two, three, four years Christians will not be here because Daesh (ISIS) kill us. We will probably be living in the U.S., Canada or Australia. Otherwise, we will be erased from this Earth.” Father Rian, who celebrated one of the masses, was equally grim about Christianity’s future in the Middle East. “What we are living is the last chapter of an ancient story,” the Chaldean Catholic priest said. About half of the Christian refugees — whom the UN regards as internally displaced persons — are jammed into the Kurdish capital, Irbil. Many of them attended the four masses offered Sunday at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. The masses were celebrated in the Chaldean and Assyrian dialects of Aramaic which are related to the language that was spoken by Jesus Christ. Those packed into the grounds at St. Joseph’s were astonished when they were told that two of Canada’s three main political parties have opposed the Harper government’s plan to send half a dozen warplanes to the Middle East to join the U.S.-led bombing campaign to drive ISIS back from Mosul and other Iraqi cities that they have captured. “If the U.S. airplanes had not been here at the right moment, Irbil would have fallen and ISIL would be here. Everybody knows it,” said Shoban Kunda, who attended Father Rian’s mass with his wife. “So we know that air power can help to stop them.”
What Canadians need to understand is that “someone has to stop Daesh, even if it takes years, because they want to destroy everything and bring us and the rest of the world back to the Middle Ages,” said Elid Matte, who like Bahnan, had escaped from the town of Qaraqosh, which is 97 per cent Christian. “It was a good beginning to start with airplanes. If ISIL had reached Irbil, they would have done to us what they did to Christians in Mosul.” It wasn’t difficult for many worshippers to get to St. Joseph’s. Thousands of Catholics have been camped out in UNHCR tents or sleeping under blankets for weeks in the small church compound or in the shells of derelict buildings across the street. “It’s OK now but the rainy season begins in one month and when winter comes and it won’t be good for anyone here,” Shobhan Kunda said. “Irbil is suffering with traffic jams. There is trash everywhere. Housing costs have gone way up.” Safa Jamel Bahnan had found a place to stay with his sister who has lived in Irbil for some time. Joining them were 60 members of their extended family. The living quarters were so tight that Bahnan, who is a big man, sleeps in a space that is two-metres long and one-metre wide. “We’ve lost everything. Many of our people now try (to) emigrate.”
Canada comes up as one of the most favoured destinations to settle in. Ayman Abdul Aziz Majid made the point by proudly showing a Canadian flag that is the screen saver on his mobile telephone. The image of the Maple Leaf also served as a link, connecting him to a Canadian government website in Arabic that explains how to emigrate to Canada. But more than anything those attending mass wanted to return to the homes they had abandoned. To get from here to there they were in unanimous agreement that it would take Canada and other western countries to send infantry and tanks, which not one of them has yet agreed to. “Bombing is not so efficacious. There will have to be troops on the ground to retake Mosul and end this very dark period,” said Father Zuhir, who joined 20 Syriac Catholic priests and 60 Syriac Catholic nuns who fled Qaraqosh. One of Zuhir’s parishioners agreed.”There must be soldiers, too,” said Sonia al-Shorahchy. “Otherwise immigration is our only future because it is impossible for me or any of us to become Muslims.”
HOLY LAND: THE PERILS FACING CHRISTIANS
Pierre Rehov
Gatestone Institute, Sept. 27, 2014
If you ask anyone in the Middle East the meaning of the saying, " First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people," he will answer with a smile: "First, we will get rid of those who pray on Saturday, and then we will get rid of those who pray on Sunday." A recent survey conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs shows that the Christian Population of Bethlehem dropped from 90% in the 19th century down to 60% in the 1990s. Today Christians make up less than 10%. What happened?
Of course, many Christians fled in the 1940s and 1960s, out of fear of the war, or as a result of intensive anti-Jewish propaganda. At that time, Christians already suffered discrimination from Muslims, and many also opposed the rebirth of the Jewish nation. Their views, apart from their faith, were more influence by the local, Arab culture, than by the European Enlightenment. The real drop in Christian population, however, took place as a side-effect of the Oslo process. As soon as Yasser Arafat and the PLO had established the Palestinian Authority [PA] in the West Bank and Gaza, Christians began to be persecuted. Despite the official stance of public figures, such as the mayor of Bethlehem, for instance, Christian residents of the PA (among them, Hanan Ashrawi, the first elected woman in the PA), live in these Muslim-controlled areas as dhimmis: according to Muslim laws, second rate citizens, protected by Muslim authorities, as long as they accept certain rules. One of these rules forbids a Christian to sell his property, whether a shop or a house, to another Christian if he decides to move abroad. Only to Muslims. But that is just the beginning.
Another practice used by PA, especially during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, was to enter the houses of Christians and fire across the valley at houses of Jews. What the Israeli soldiers see is just a muzzle-flash coming from a window, so they return fire and shoot back it. They do not know if it is coming from a "Muslim" window or a "Christian" window. The Christians, tired of having their apartments and houses shot into, moved out — and their neighbors moved in. During the siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002, terrorists used the same strategy, firing at Israeli troops from within the holiest Christian shrine in Bethlehem, meanwhile desecrating the inside of the Church. Nuns and priests called for help, but nobody heard their voices. Apparently the story is only appealing when Israel can be blamed. Two years earlier, Pope John Paul II, while visiting Bethlehem, had, in silence, to face the insult of being interrupted during his speech by the Mufti's call for prayers… even though it was not the time for prayers. The scene, filmed by Italy's Rai2, was later on erased from its archives, at the request of the Vatican. The same type of proceedings occurred during the recent visit of Pope Francis, who was led to stop and pray in front of the security barrier, which had been first freshly covered with inflammatory graffiti, even though this stop was not included in the protocol, nor, probably, would it have been had his delegation received the courtesy of a request.
In any event, in 2006, Hassan El Masalmeh, a Hamas member of the Bethlehem City Council, publicly announced his intention to implement a discriminatory tax on non-Muslim residents. This tax, called jizya, has existed since the birth of Islam as part of dhimmi laws in many Middle East countries. In the meantime, many Christian families complained that their daughters were being threatened with forced conversions, and, as they did not dress with sufficient Islamic modesty, were often faced with rape. Official complaints, understandably, are rare. After years of persecution, dhimmis, are afraid of retaliation and often, if they want to keep on living in their neighborhoods in what they hope will be peace, take the side of their persecutors. In 2012, for example, the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, known for its basic anti-Semitic views, fully backed the application for "Palestine's" membership to the United Nation by publishing a letter condemning Israel in harsh terms: We, Palestinian Christians are the descendants of the first Christians. We are also an organic and integral component of the Palestinian people. And just like our Palestinian Muslim brothers and sisters, we have been denied our national and human rights for almost a century…We have persevered through 64 years of exile and 45 years of occupation, holding on to His message of peace. We, Palestinian Christians say enough! Our message is simple: to achieve peace, the world must also say enough to occupation and the degradation of human dignity.
Other Christian officials, such as the then Archibishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, do not even hide their basic anti-Semitism when they blame Jews (and even Christians) for the suffering of their flocks under Muslim rule. What the letter does not express, is the reality of daily life in most of the Palestinian Authority. "All this talk about Israel being behind the pain of Christians in the Palestinian Territories is nonsense," said a Christian official, who asked to remain anonymous for reasons of security. "Muslims intimidate us. They burn our stores, steal our real estate. They build mosques beside our churches, and make sure that the calls for pray disrupt our services. They attack our daughters and insult them. There are many cases of rape that have never been reported. Families hide it out of shame, they move away. They flee." In 2013, a few families of Bethlehem and Ramallah finally wrote a letter to the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. More than 150 attacks on Christian properties had been documented and reported, including land theft, forces conversions, death threats, and physical violence.
Because, under dhimmi laws, non-Muslims under Muslim rule may not testify against Muslims, it is virtually impossible for Christians whose lands have been stolen, or lives have been threatened, to appeal to the local legal system. Many who have dared to file complaints are still waiting to receive an answer to them. In the meantime, Christian population inside Israel didn't stop increasing, and has now reached approximately 140,000. It has been reported than an orthodox Priest, Father Gabriel Nada, recently created an organization promoting the enrollment of Christians in the IDF. The numbers have not been published by the Israel Defense Forces, but the hundreds of Christians who enrolled chose combat units. Recently, and Israeli Arab film maker, Suha Arraf, presented her latest work at the Venice film festival, and received a lot of attention for labeling it "Palestinian" after receiving close to $400,000 from the Israeli Film Fund. The film pretends to describe the life of a Christian Family in Ramallah, suffering from an identity crisis… due to the Israeli occupation. But Suha Arraf is not a Palestinian. She is an Israeli Christian Arab. Of course, the Israeli Ministry of Culture, feeling betrayed — as its purpose is to participate in the production of films carrying Israeli identity — asked for a full refund. Interviewed on the matter by the extreme left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the film maker answered that she was Israeli, Christian and Arab but felt as "Palestinian" as most of the Arabs living in Israel. What Suha Arraf tried to describe in a romantic way would have been far more scary if she just stuck to the facts, rather than the politically correct narrative, which is to portray all Arabs living in the Territories as "suffering from the occupation."
There might be a connection between the way Christians are treated inside Israel, despite Muslim and anti-Semitic propaganda, and this increasing determination to be able freely to live in the religion of their choice: as Christian-Israelis. Certainly not as Palestinians. Sorry, you who think that all Arabs living in the PA are "suffering from the occupation." You got it all wrong.
MUSLIM PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS
Raymond Ibrahim
Frontpage, Sept. 10, 2014
From one end of the Islamic world to the other, the abduction and rape of Christian girls at the hands of Muslims—both terrorists and laymen—was a dominant theme in April. On Easter Sunday Morning, for instance, four Muslim men raped a 7-year-old Christian girl named Sara in a Punjabi village. Last reported, the child was in an intensive care unit in “critical.” According to Asia News, “the police, instead of arresting the culprits, helped the local clan to kidnap the girl’s father; Iqbal Masih was taken and hidden in a secret place to ‘force the family not to report the story, to reach an agreement with the criminals and to avoid a dispute of a religious background.’”
According to a human rights lawyer involved in the case: “Such cases are frequent: abuse against women and girls by Muslim men are examples of how the minorities in Pakistan live under constant fear of persecution. We believe that many cases of violence go unreported.” Similarly, a new report appearing in April by the Solidarity and Peace Movement—a coalition of NGOs, associations and institutions including the “Justice and Peace” Commission of the Pakistani Bishops—confirmed that “an estimated 700 cases per year involve Christian women, 300 Hindu girls.” Even so, “the true extent of the problem is probably much bigger, since many cases are not reported.”
The biggest story, however, came from Nigeria, where the Islamic terrorist organization known as Boko Haram abducted nearly 300, mostly Christian, teenage schoolgirls. The group justified its actions in Islamic terms; its leader declared on video that “I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah….There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.” The so-called mainstream media, which generally downplays or ignores Boko Haram’s terror campaign, actually reported on this particular atrocity, prompting Western authorities—who are much more accustomed to, and comfortable with, pretending these sorts of things don’t exist—to respond in awkward, hypocritical and, in a word, foolish, ways. Thus, Secretary of State John Kerry, saying the U.S. had been in touch with Nigeria “from day one” of the crisis, asserted “I think now the complications that have arisen have convinced everybody that there needs to be a greater effort. And it will begin immediately. I mean, literally, immediately.” It is not clear whom Kerry was referring to when he said “convinced everybody”—unless he was referring to himself. After all, there might not have been any need for “greater effort,” the need to act “immediately. I mean, literally, immediately” had Kerry only let the Nigerian government do its job one year ago, when they were waging a particularly strong and successful offensive against Boko Haram in the very same region that the schoolgirls were recently kidnapped. Back then, in May 2013, soon after Nigerian forces killed 30 Boko Haram members, Reuters reported that “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strongly worded statement [to the Nigerian president] saying: “We are … deeply concerned by credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism” from Boko Haram.
As for Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton, who publicly bemoaned the lot of the kidnapped girls—saying it’s “abominable, it’s criminal, it’s an act of terrorism and it really merits the fullest response possible”—when she was Secretary of State and in a position to help offer “the fullest response possible” she repeatedly refused to designate Boko Haram as a “foreign terrorist organizations,” despite the countless atrocities it had already committed, despite the fact that under her tenure Boko Haram had boasted it would “strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women,” and despite urging from the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and several congressmen and senators. Her logic was once voiced by her husband, former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Back in February 2012, Clinton declared that “inequality” and “poverty” are “what’s fueling all this stuff”—a reference to Boko Haram’s terror—and warned the Nigerian government that “It is almost impossible to cure a problem based on violence with violence.”
The rest of April’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
INSTRUCTIONS FROM PROPHET MUHAMMAD ON THE
CARE AND FEEDING OF CHRISTIANS
Paul Merkley
Bayview Review, Sept. 26, 2014
As the political scene in the Middle East becomes increasingly crowded and confused, only one theme (it seems to me) becomes ever clearer, even though it is among the least discussed in our midst: The Christian communities of the Arab world are being forced upon the path to extermination. The notion that illiberal attitudes and religious obscurantism would dissolve as the Arab Spring advanced – as democracy developed on Arab soil — has been utterly discredited. In Egypt, the largest of the Arab nations, and the one that seemed to hold out the most promise at first, the experiment in democracy has been dismantled; but the Christian minority (most of them belonging to the ancient and indigenous Coptic Church) has been severely weakened by three years of menace from Islamist mobs. The political eclipse of the Muslim Brotherhood has evidently not significantly reduced this menace…
Even before the Arab Spring sprang we had already seen the fruits of democracy in Iraq. Ancient hatreds between and among Sunnis and Shias, Kurds, Turkmen and other tribes and sects prevented the creation – at least until now — of a government to which a majority felt loyalty, leaving a huge vacuum of power and authority into which has recently plunged the most satanic of all the Islamist movements – the Islamic State. All along, liquidation of Christians has been the only item on the to-do list of all of the Arab parties. After Saddam Hussein fell in 2003 and as the Americans began the grandiose experiment in making Iraq fit for democracy, the Muslim masses of Iraq, encouraged by fiery sermons from their imams, began to terrorize the Christians. With the political-opportunist Saddam Hussein removed, Muhammad’s instruction to seek conversion by force of Christians or compel them to permanent subordination through the jizyah was immediately ringing throughout the land. Long before ISIS was on the scene, perhaps one-third of Iraq’s Christians — people who had lived in the land between the Euphrates River and the Tigris River for at least 600 years before Muhammad was born — had been forced to flee to parts of Iraq remote from their homes, notably to the Kurdish Autonomous Region. Many of these are already taking the next step: fleeing the Middle East altogether. In Afghanistan, a decade after the West overthrew the Taliban-controlled government, committing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, the last church has been destroyed, even as brave individual Christians suffer under blasphemy and apostasy laws enforced by a government whose bills are still being paid by the west.
In Syria, where literally hundreds of Islamist gangs took hold in the vacuum created by the retreat of the armies of Bashir al-Assad, a systematic pogrom was well under way against some of the oldest Christian churches in the world before the end of 2012. The verdict of the well-informed was that nothing could be done about this. Most of those few NGOs that were capable of discerning something wrong about the persecution of Christians favored emigration of the Christians to Europe as the best solution all ‘round to the unhappiness caused by their continued presence in the Arab world. Assad abetted this persecution from the beginning, insisting that Christians were among the many subversive elements dedicated to overthrowing his regime. Part of the price paid by the United States and the other Western powers to get Assad to cooperate in the work of dismantling his stock of chemical weapons was to abstain from offering protection to the desperate Syrian Christians, lest such activity be construed as compromising pledges not to interfere with the balance of forces on the ground. (Raymond Ibrahim, “Largest massacre of Christians in Syria ignored,” www.meforum.org, November 21, 2013.) About one-third of Syria’s Christian population of about 1.8 million has abandoned Syria since the civil war began. (“Syrian Christians facing extinction: ‘A tragedy of historic proportions,’” Christian Today, August 15, 2014.)
The triumph of ISIS throughout large portions of what used to be called Syria and Iraq, as well as its possibly imminent triumph throughout parts of Lebanon, Jordan and even Turkey, has led most of the Islamist gangs to declare their acceptance, if not always their wholehearted allegiance, to the self-proclaimed Caliph of All the Muslims in the World. Wherever ISIS has taken hold (at least for the time being) the program of liquidation of all Christians residing in the Muslim world has been pursued with literally unprecedented ruthlessness. It can be so ruthless because it comes from an utterly clear conscience; and this is because, unlike the messages of all the governments still extant in the Arab world, and unlike the messages from all the political movements that we imagine command allegiance on other premises throughout the Muslim world, it comes from the clear instruction of the founder of Islam, Prophet Muhammad. The message is “Convert to Islam or face the sword.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Paul Merkley is a CIJR Academic Fellow
Top Church Destroying Countries: Tom Olago, Prophecy News Watch, Aug. 28, 2014—Recent research has shown that there are certain countries where churches are at high risk of deliberate systematic destruction, as well as sporadic attacks through religious intolerance and terrorism.
How Christians are Persecuted in the PA: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, Sept. 30, 2014—Persecution of Christians by Muslims throughout the Middle East is severe and has been progressively increasing in intensity.
Alarmed by Regional Threat, Lebanon’s Christians Take Up Arms: Bassem Mroue & Zeina Karam, Globe & Mail, Sept. 5, 2014 —Every day around sunset, dozens of residents of this small Lebanese Christian village on the border carry their automatic rifles and deploy on surrounding hills, taking up positions and laying ambushes in case Muslim extremists from neighbouring Syria attack.
ISIS Wants to Provoke a Crusade: Christopher Dickey, Daily Beast, Aug. 18, 2014—Pope Francis is walking a knife edge—or perhaps, better said, the blade of a crusaders’ sword—as he tries to mobilize support for Christians and other minorities victimized by the ferocious partisans of the so-called Islamic state.
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