50
community. Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, urged the nation to unite and turn
would-be suicide bombers into friends by building “an inclusive circle of love[9].”
The same Archbishop has also said that British Christians should see Muslims as allies in
the struggle against secularism[10]. A number of Christian, and some Jewish, leaders
shared this point of view both during the death threats against Salman Rushdie and
during the Danish cartoon Jihad.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia, about 10,000 Christians have been killed[11] between 1998
and 2003 and about 1,000 churches have been burnt down by Muslim mobs. The radicals
want Indonesia to be the foundation of a Southeast Asian caliphate[12] that will launch
Jihad against other nations such as Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Australia
until they submit to Islam. In the Indonesian province Aceh, where sharia law officially
prevails, Muslim mobs razed a church in response to a forged (by a Muslim)
advertisement inviting Muslims to a Christian revival service. Witnesses said there were
over 100 Muslim men present[13], many of them carrying swords. They poured gasoline
over the building and set fire to it.
Why this aggressive reaction? According to Islamic law, Christians and Jews (not other
religious groups) can live in an area dominated by Muslims, but only if they accept their
status as second-rate citizens, dhimmis. This implies many restrictions, such as never
trying to convert or preach to Muslims, never to have a relationship with a Muslim
woman and never to say anything insulting about Islam or Muhammad. If even one
single person breaches any of these conditions, the entire dhimmi community will be
punished, and Jihad resumes. Notice that while Muslims, following each case of Islamic
terrorism, are quick to say that not all Muslims should be punished for the actions of a
few, this is precisely what sharia prescribes for non-Muslims.
What’s worse is that in practice, as in this case from Indonesia, attacks on non-Muslims
can be triggered by unconfirmed rumours, personal grudges by Muslims or outright lies.
In reality, this means that all non-Muslims will live with a constant, internalised fear of
saying or doing anything that could insult Muslims, which would immediately set off
physical attacks against them and their children. This state of constant fear is called
dhimmitude. Many Middle Eastern, Pakistani and Indonesian Christians know that as a
matter of survival, they must say one thing in public and another in private. They are
held hostage in their own countries[14].
In Egypt, a film depiction[15] of someone converting to Islam and then becoming
disillusioned with his new religion was enough to bring more than 5,000 protestors to the
church, get a nun stabbed and three people killed. Muslims interpreted it as a breach of
the traditional Islamic law mandating death for anyone who leaves Islam, and of the old
dhimmi laws forbidding non-Muslims to proselytise.
Bishop Armia of the Coptic Church in Egypt, which predates the 7th century Arab
invasion and preserves the last remainder of the language of the ancient pharaohs,
assured that “Copts would never tolerate anyone insulting Islam.” Coptic Pope Shenouda
III, knowing fully well that any provocation could mean mayhem and murder for his
fellow Copts, has reiterated that[16] “any remarks which offend Islam and Muslims are
against the teachings of Christ.”
Several recent incidents have demonstrated that Muslims are now trying to apply these
dhimmi rules to the entire Western world. The most important one was the burning of
churches and embassies triggered by the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. This
was, down to the last comma, exactly the way Muslims would treat the persecuted non-
Muslims in their own countries. The cartoon Jihad indicated that Muslims now felt strong
enough to apply sharia rules to Denmark, and by extension NATO. Hardly anybody in the
mainstream Western media made any attempts to explain this to the public.
49
In another case, angry protests raged across the Muslim world over a Newsweek
magazine report[17] that interrogators at the U.S. military prison Guantanamo Bay had
put the Koran on toilets, and in at least one case flushing it down. The escalating violence
prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to urge Muslims to resist calls for violence.
“Disrespect for the Holy Koran is abhorrent to us all,” she said. Newsweek later retracted
their original article, which was found to be baseless.
In November 2002, days before the Miss World pageant in Nigeria, a Nigerian newspaper
published an article in which the writer suggested that Islam’s prophet, Muhammad,
would have approved the pageant and would have chosen a wife amongst the
contestants. The article sparked a Jihad riot in which over 200 people were killed and
thousands injured. The next day, the newspaper published an apology. The president of
Nigeria went on national television and condemned the newspaper. He said, “It could
happen anytime irresponsible journalism is committed against Islam.”
As one African observer later noted[18] about the Newsweek story, the reaction of the
White House in the United States was largely similar to that a Third World president gave
when faced with the same challenge. For Muslims, the world’s only remaining superpower
appeared to play the role of dhimmis.
Bishop Artemije, the spiritual leader of Kosovo’s beleaguered Serbs[19], has warned
against Western support for an independent state in the province, where Muslim
Albanians greatly outnumber Christian Serbs and have destroyed many churches and
monasteries under the auspices of NATO soldiers. The Bishop warns that independence
would reward ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims. Since 9-11, he said, “the United States
has been engaged in a global struggle against jihad terrorism, which threatens not just
America but peaceful people of all faiths and nationalities. That is why we who live in the
Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija find it difficult to understand why so many
voices of influence in Washington support a course of action that would hand to the
terrorists a significant victory in Europe.”
While Muslims responded with deadly outrage to the now-retracted report by Newsweek
of alleged Koran desecration, there was little outcry when Islamic gunmen in 2002 holed
up in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, assumed to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ,
used the Bible as toilet paper[20]. About 30 priests, monks and nuns, and more than 150
Palestinian civilians, who hid inside to escape a gun battle between Israelis and
Palestinians, remained inside the church with the armed militants for more than five
weeks. Some of the Palestinian fighters, who belonged to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade,
part of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organisation, were received as heroes
when they later returned to Gaza.
During the so-called Oslo peace process from the mid 1990s, while Palestinian authorities
received financial support from Western nations, Arafat increased the boundaries of
Bethlehem to include nearby Muslim villages, and encouraged Muslims to settle in the
city[21]. As a result, the percentage of Christians rapidly declined.
The Islamic gunmen were also responsible for the rape and murder of two Christian
teenage sisters[22]. The assailants claimed that the sisters had been murdered because
they were “prostitutes” and had been “collaborating” with Israeli security forces. “The
gangsters murdered the two sisters so that they would not tell anyone about the rape,”
said a family member. “Many Christian families have sent their daughters abroad for fear
they would come under attack by Muslim men.” “Some of the murderers were later killed
by the Israeli army, but others are now living in Europe after they had sought refuge in
the Church of Nativity. It’s absurd that Muslim men who rape and murder Christian girls
are given political asylum in Christian countries like Ireland, Spain and Italy.”
52
The irony is that the same sexual harassment and rape of non-Muslim women, part and
parcel of Jihad, is now spreading to cities in Western Europe[23] with many Muslim
immigrants[24].
Professor Weiner, Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
provides an in-depth look[25] into the nearly uninterrupted persecution of Christians
throughout the decade since the Oslo peace process began. The Christians have shrunk
to less than 1.7 percent of the population in the Palestinian areas. “Tens of thousands
have abandoned their holy sites and ancestral properties to live abroad, while those who
remain do so as a beleaguered and dwindling minority,” Weiner said. “Their plight is, in
part, attributable to the adoption of Muslim religious law (sharia) in the constitution of
the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, the Christians have been abandoned by their
religious leaders who, instead of protecting them, have chosen to curry favor with the
Palestinian leadership.”
More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar, attacked the Christian village of
Taiba[26] east of Ramallah. “They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on
fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical
appliances,” said one resident. The attack was triggered by the murder of a Muslim
woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir. Her family forced her to drink poison for
having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba. Muslim men can marry Christian
women, but Islamic law forbids Muslim women from marrying Christian men. The
Christian community was thus collectively punished because it was rumoured that one of
their members had breached the rules of dhimmitude.
In a meeting attended by Robert Spencer, former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky
noted[27] that Israel had again and again aided Christians – at their own request –
against Islamic violence and injustice, most notably when the Church of the Nativity was
occupied by Jihadists in 2002. Yet international Christian leaders, he said, have not
responded with similar gestures toward Israel. He is right. While Christians are
persecuted on a daily basis in Muslim nations and may soon be wiped out in the Holy
Land, Christian organisations in the West are too frequently engaged in “dialogue” with
Muslims and demonisation of Israel. Christians need to realise that they have much more
in common with other non-Muslims, not just Jews, but Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and
Atheists, than they will ever have with Muslims. Jussi Halla-Aho, running for parliament in
Finland as an independent candidate, has come to some of the same conclusions[28] as I
have regarding the Leftist-Islamic cooperation in many Western nations: The Left milks
the working natives to maintain a predominantly idle immigrant population, who
thankfully vote for the Left. The welfare state society thus has to support two parasites,
each living in a symbiotic relationship with the other. This will eventually cause the
system to collapse. Why would anyone support a policy that leads to certain destruction?
Well, because a career politician never sets his sights 20, 50 or 100 years to the future
but instead focuses on the next election. The short-term focus of our democratic system
can thus, combined with Muslim immigration, turn into a fatal flaw.
But Halla-Aho asks an even more important question: “Why do the voters let all this
happen? It is because Westerners like to be ‘good’ people and believe that their fellow
men are equally good people. It is because they have humane values.” “It is because the
moral and ethical values of Western man have made him helpless in the face of
wickedness and immorality.”
Our Western “moral and ethical values” are profoundly influenced by Judeo-Christian
thinking. Will our openness to outsiders, our democratic system and our Christian
compassion, precisely the values that we cherish the most, render the West incapable of
withstanding Jihad? A good Christian has to turn the other cheek and love his enemies.
How are we to reconcile this with the reality that Muslims regard this as a sign of
weakness? And how can we fight sharia when bishops and church leaders are the first to
49
call for a “compassionate” immigration policy that allows masses of Muslims to settle
here? Christians argue that Europe’s problem is a cultural vacuum[29] created by the
retreat of church attendance and Christianity as a religion, which has paved the way for
Islam to enter. They have a point, as I have shown before. But some Christian groups are
opening the West to Islam, too, and the secular state doesn’t have to be insipid and
toothless. Far from it, it was secular states that fought and defeated the Fascist regimes
during WW2 and risked the destruction of the planet in the Cold War. The non-religious
authorities in China are far more ruthless in crushing any Islamic aggression than most
Christian countries are. Of course, the downside is that they are far more ruthless in
crushing anything deemed to be a potential challenge to their power.
Luckily, not all Christian leaders are appeasers of Islam. One of the intelligent ones
comes from Australia, a country that has been fairly resistant to Political Correctness.
They have taken serious steps towards actually enforcing their own borders, despite the
predictable outcries from various NGOs and anti-racists, and Prime Minister John Howard
has repeatedly proven to be one of the most sensible leaders in the Western world.
George Cardinal Pell[30], Archbishop of Sydney, tells of how September 11 was a wake-
up call for him personally[31]:
“I recognised that I had to know more about Islam.” “In my own reading of the Koran, I
began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I
abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.” “The predominant grammatical form
in which jihad is used in the Koran carries the sense of fighting or waging war.” “Considered
strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for fear-reaching
renovation is severely limited.” “I’d also say that Islam is a much more war-like culture
than Christianity.” “I’ve had it asserted to me is that in the relationship between the Islamic
and non-Islamic world, the normal thing is a situation of tension if not war, or outright
hostility.”
Pope Benedict XVI, nicknamed “God’s rottweiler” as a cardinal, seems to embody
elements of both the sensible and the silly Christian ways of dealing with the Islamic
threat. Although Benedict has stressed the need for “reciprocity” in Christian-Muslim
relations and urged Islamic countries to ensure religious rights for Christian migrants, he
has also said that Christians should continue welcoming Muslim immigrants[32] with
open arms.
It caused an uproar in the Islamic world when Benedict XVI, as a part of a longer
dissertation, quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor’s hostile view[33] of Islam’s
founder: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find
things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he
preached.” Benedict later said he was “deeply sorry” for the reaction to his comments on
Islam and that the quote he used from the medieval text about holy wars did not reflect
his personal thoughts. Although this technically constitutes a non-apology apology and
was deemed “unsatisfactory” by Muslims, many anti-Jihadists would have preferred the
Pope to use the opportunity to make a clearer stand against Islamic aggression.
Still, his comments raised public debate about the issue, and certainly marked progress
compared to his predecessor Pope John Paul II, who kissed the Koran in public in an
effort to reach out to Muslims.
I have described examples of incredible stupidity and appeasement from Christians in the
West, but also of courage and clarity of mind in standing up to Islamic aggression and
defending Western civilisation and the world from sharia. The ideological civil war within
the West is not just between secularists and religious people; it runs straight through the
Church itself.
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
