Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World
February 6, 2012
From one end of the muslim world to the
other, Christians are being murdered for their faith.
We hear so often about Muslims as victims of
abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring's fight against tyranny.
But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway-an unrecognized battle
costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world
because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global
alarm.
The portrayal of Muslims as victims or
heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of
Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching
from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some
countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and
imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken
matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions
where their roots go back centuries.
The media's reticence on the subject no
doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence.
Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization
of Islamic Cooperation-a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi
Arabia-and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade,
these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading
public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of
perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and
sinister derangement called "Islamophobia"-a term that is meant to elicit the
same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.
But a fair-minded assessment of recent
events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of
Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently
coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.
The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious
intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity-and
ultimately of all religious minorities-in the Islamic world is at
stake.
From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to
bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many
nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of
persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in
proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For
years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war.
Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such
organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means "Western
education is sacrilege." Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end
it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the
country.
In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko
Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510
people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern
states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting "Allahu
akbar" ("God is great") while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They
have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer
parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on
killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as
well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using
crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in
2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group's recent attacks show a new
level of potency and sophistication.
The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for
years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni
Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist
minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in
practice the Sudanese government's sustained persecution of religious
minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that
began in 2003. Even though Sudan's Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been
indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him
with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the
semi-independence he granted to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence
has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial
bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnapping of children, and other
atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and
75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their resi-dences and that
houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed.
Both kinds of persecution undertaken by
extragovernmental groups as well as by agents of the state have come together in
Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. On Oct. 9 of last year in the Maspero
area of Cairo, Coptic Christians (who make up roughly 11 percent of Egypt's
population of 81 million) marched in protest against a wave of attacks by
Islamists-including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders-that
followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship. During the protest,
Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on
protesters, crushing and killing at least 24 and wounding more than 300 people.
By the end of the year more than 200,000 Copts had fled their homes in
anticipation of more attacks. With Islamists poised to gain much greater power
in the wake of recent elections, their fears appear to be
justified.
Egypt is not the only Arab country that
seems bent on wiping out its Christian minority. Since 2003 more than 900 Iraqi
Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in
Baghdad alone, and 70 churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian
International News Agency (AINA). Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a
result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of
Christians in the country to fewer than half a million from just over a million
before 2003. AINA understandably describes this as an "incipient genocide or
ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq."
The 2.8 million Christians who live in
Pakistan make up only about 1.6 percent of the population of more than 170
million. As members of such a tiny minority, they live in perpetual fear not
only of Islamist terrorists but also of Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws.
There is, for example, the notorious case of a Christian woman who was sentenced
to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. When international
pressure persuaded Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer to explore ways of freeing her, he
was killed by his bodyguard. The bodyguard was then celebrated by prominent
Muslim clerics as a hero-and though he was sentenced to death late last year,
the judge who imposed the sentence now lives in hiding, fearing for his
life.
Such cases are not unusual in Pakistan. The
nation's blasphemy laws are routinely used by criminals and intolerant Pakistani
Muslims to bully religious minorities. Simply to declare belief in the Christian
Trinity is considered blasphemous, since it contradicts mainstream Muslim
theological doctrines. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the
blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. Just ask the members of the
Christian aid group World Vision. Its offices were attacked in the spring of
2010 by 10 gunmen armed with grenades, leaving six people dead and four wounded.
A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack on the grounds
that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the
survivors of a major earthquake.)
Not even Indonesia-often touted as the
world's most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation-has been
immune to the fevers of Christophobia. According to data compiled by the
Christian Post, the number of violent incidents committed against religious
minorities (and at 7 percent of the population, Christians are the country's
largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276, between 2010
and 2011.
The litany of suffering could be extended.
In Iran dozens of Christians have been arrested and jailed for daring to worship
outside of the officially sanctioned church system. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile,
deserves to be placed in a category of its own. Despite the fact that more than
a million Christians live in the country as foreign workers, churches and even
private acts of Christian prayer are banned; to enforce these totalitarian
restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and
bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries
less legal weight than a Muslim's. Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a
majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority
have become a problem.
It should be clear from this catalog of
atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem.
No, the violence isn't centrally planned or coordinated by some international
Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn't a traditional
war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by
Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.
As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson
Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with
Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have "lost the
protection of their societies." This is especially so in countries with growing
radical Islamist (Salafist) movements. In those nations, vigilantes often feel
they can act with impunity and government inaction often proves them right. The
old idea of the Ottoman Turks-that non-Muslims in Muslim societies deserve
protection (albeit as second-class citizens)-has all but vanished from wide
swaths of the Islamic world, and increasingly the result is bloodshed and
oppression.
So let us please get our priorities
straight. Yes, Western governments should protect Muslim minorities from
intolerance. And of course we should ensure that they can worship, live, and
work freely and without fear. It is the protection of the freedom of conscience
and speech that distinguishes free societies from unfree ones. But we also need
to keep perspective about the scale and severity of intolerance. Cartoons,
films, and writings are one thing; knives, guns, and grenades are something else
entirely.
As for what the West can do to help
religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to
begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries
as leverage. Then there is trade and investment. Besides diplomatic pressure,
these aid and trade relationships can and should be made conditional on the
protection of the freedom of conscience and worship for all
citizens.
Instead of falling for overblown tales of
Western Islamophobia, let's take a real stand against the Christophobia
infecting the Muslim world. Tolerance is for everyone-except the
intolerant.
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