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MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Germany, Anti-Islam, and Vladimir Putin By STEPHEN SULEYMAN SCHWARTZ

Hezi Aris — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 21:15:38 +0000

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C.

On Monday, December 15, as reported by the German news service Deutsche Welle (DW), some 15,000 people massed in Dresden, Germany, under the banner of a new and seemingly informal movement calling itself Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West — PEGIDA by its German-language acronym. The incident was the ninth PEGIDA rally in Dresden since the marches began in October “in response to clashes between Kurds and Sunni Muslims [in Germany] over the West’s intervention in Syria,” according to DW.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned the PEGIDA phenomenon, declaring, “There is no place in Germany for those who are instigating hatred against immigrants.”

Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA) has organized numerous demonstrations in Germany against what it calls the Islamization of Europe during the last two months.

Americans and other Westerners have become accustomed to public criticism, some of it extreme, of Islam. But certain aspects of the Dresden events may have escaped their notice, and are enigmatic, to say the least.

Dresden, in the German state of Saxony, near the border with the Czech Republic, although the center of the anti-Islam movement, has the fewest population of foreigners in Germany, according to Rick Noack, writing in The Washington Post. Since Dresden is in former East Germany, or the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR), where economic immigration from Islamic lands was rare, most foreign workers in the GDR came from Communist Vietnam or from Soviet-aligned countries in Africa.

Anti-Islam rallies are taking place in a part of Germany where there are almost no Muslims.

The pattern of German Muslim concentration in former West Germany, or the “Federal Republic of Germany” (FRG), has not changed. The whole of former East Germany — the “new states” — has only 25,000 Turks, or 0.2 percent of the entire population in the ex-Communist zone.

In 2010, even cosmopolitan Berlin had only 175,000 Turks, or 5 percent of its population of 3.5 million, overwhelmingly in the former West Berlin. This contrasts with the western industrial state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW), with the largest Muslim representation, where Turks count a million, somewhat more than 5 percent of the total NRW state population of 18 million.

Why, then, are anti-Islam rallies taking place in a part of Germany where there are almost no Muslims? One explanation might be that having little experience with Muslims, the inhabitants of Dresden are frightened of any newcomers, especially refugees from Syria. “Many eastern Germans know only few or no foreigners; they are scared because they have no idea what to expect from the influx of refugees,” said Dresden-based political scientist Werner Patzelt to the previously mentioned Rick Noack.

But other factors merit consideration. The Dresden anti-Islam demonstrations have included slogans decrying Chancellor Merkel’s sharp attitude countering the aggressive machinations of Russian president Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and other former Communist countries, now independent.

Two photographs reproduced on The Huffington Post UK on December 9 showed signs from a PEGIDA mass meeting reading “Frieden mit Russland! Nie wieder Krieg in Europa!” (“Peace with Russia! Never again war in Europe!”) and “Wollt ihr den totalen Russlandfeldzug?” (“Do you want a total war campaign against Russia?”). The latter included a rudely defaced photograph of Merkel as an American servant.

Writing for Bloomberg View on December 17, Leonid Bershidsky spelled out a disturbing context for the Dresden turmoil. He pointed out that the anti-immigrant National Front in France “has loudly bucked Europe’s ongoing policy of ostracizing the Russian president, and has received millions of euros from Russia in return.” Given the PEGIDA mix of anti-Islam and pro-Russian slogans, he stated, “Putin’s strategy seems to be to build up a ‘fifth column’ of far-right parties in Europe willing to cooperate with the Kremlin.”

Bershidsky, citing the authoritative German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, noted that a seemingly bizarre slogan displayed at the PEGIDA turnout on December 15 was “Putin, hilfe uns!” (“Putin, help us!”).

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung itself published an image from the December 15 Dresden gathering of a placard reading “Weg mit der Kriegstreiber-Regierung! Deutschland RAUS aus der NATO!” (“Fight the warmongers’ government! Germany OUT of NATO!”).

Dresden and Saxony, like much of the rest of the former East Germany, remain influenced by Russia. Bershidsky referred to economic links, but political channels may be more significant. Vladimir Putin, serving as an officer of the former KGB, was headquartered in Dresden. It is certainly not beyond imagining that the Russians left networks behind them in Germany as “sleepers” after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

For her part, Angela Merkel was born in Hamburg (West Germany) but lived most of her life, before 1989, in East Germany. Her father, a Lutheran pastor, had gone to the Communist zone to administer a church there.

Putin may view support for the anti-Islam uproar in Dresden as a way to mobilize his former agents and an additional option in challenging Merkel over the destiny of the former Soviet empire. Raising a furor over Syrian refugees could also be a ploy to reinforce Moscow’s alliance with Damascus dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Mingling of anti-Islam and pro-Russian rhetoric in Germany could reflect mere opportunistic exploitation of the former movement by adherents of Moscow, but that seems unlikely.

PEGIDA and its founder, Lutz Bachmann, have sought to distance themselves from neo-Nazi agitation against immigrants, especially Muslims.

PEGIDA and its founder, Lutz Bachmann, have sought to distance themselves from neo-Nazi agitation against immigrants, especially Muslims. Rather, it claims, “We want to preserve our free-thinking, our free and open lifestyle for ALL people living in Europe!” Regarding participants in PEGIDA, Deutsche Welle has cited the academic expert Patzelt affirming that “the majority are completely normal people. Of course, they’re not people who usually vote Green, or the Left party, or the SPD [Social Democrats], but they’re not extremists.”

Reviewing the pro-Russian verbiage visible at the PEGIDA manifestations, one may conclude confidently that Germany will not leave NATO, and that even in his most unrestrained moments, Putin would not interfere directly in the former East Germany as he has in Ukraine.

Many observers may see in PEGIDA no more than another example of the “new populism” in Europe. But an anti-Islam, pro-Russian alliance is dangerous for its advocates. Alignment of Russian ambitions and German discontent has been seen before: in the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, which allowed Germany to conquer most of Europe before turning on Russia. Germans should be wary about these issues.

First published by The Huffington Post  December 19, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schwartz/germany-antiislam-and-vla_b_6346978.html

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, D.C. and author of The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony (2008), Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook (2005), and The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role In Terrorism (2002).

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MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Heading for a Jew-Free Turkey By BURAK BEKDĪL

Hezi Aris — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 20:25:07 +0000

“We face threats, attacks and harassment every day,” writes Turkish Jewish columnist Mois Gabay.

“The imam in the neighbourhood has the habit of preaching to his congregation ‘not to make friends with Jews or Christians.‘” — Two shop-owners, Istanbul.

* * *

“The circle is closing in.” — Moris Gabay, writer for Salom.

* * *

So, did your good friend Dink deserve to be murdered because he humiliated Muslims?

* * *

“There are laws against hate speech, but not a single person has ever been prosecuted [let alone sentenced] for insulting [Jews].” — Moris Gabay, writer for Salom.

* * *

Burak Bekdīl, based in Ankara, is a columnist for the Turkish daily Hürriyet and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, there were about 200,000 Jews in Turkish lands – when the entire population was barely 10 million. Today, the Turkish population has reached 77 million – and there are fewer than 17,000 Jews.

Moris Gabay, a Turkish Jewish writer for Salom, the Istanbul Jewish newspaper, recently wrote in his column, “Are Turkish Jews Leaving?:” “We face threats, attacks and harassment every day. Hope is fading. Is it necessary for a ‘Hrant among us’ to be shot in order for the government, the opposition, civil society, our neighbors and jurists to see this?” ‘Hrant’ whom he referred to is Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian journalist who was shot dead in 2007 by a gang of nationalist Turks.

On Dec. 15, the Turkish liberal daily Radikal interviewed Gabay, who started by showing Radikal‘s reporter dozens of threats and hate messages he has received through Twitter, Facebook and mail messages. “This is almost daily,” he said.

According to Gabay, only this year 37% of high-school graduates in Istanbul’s Jewish community left Turkey to study abroad, twice as many as in previous years. “We don’t know how many of them will return,” he says. “But the idea to leave Turkey (for good) is also in the minds of my generation.”

The reason is simple: “The circle is closing in,” according to Gabay. “In an atmosphere like this, especially if you are a trader, you tend to change your name. Mois’s tends to become “Musa’s,” “Cefi’s,” become “Cem’s” and “Meri’s” become “Peri’s” (all the latter are Turkish names.) His Jewish friends tell Gabay that they are elaborating on the idea of leaving Turkey and settling in far-away countries such as Canada, Panama and Australia. Two Jewish friends of his who have shops in Istanbul’s busy Unkapani district recently complained to him that “The imam in the neighbourhood has the habit of preaching to his congregation ‘not to make friends with Jews and Christians.'”

According to Gabay, “the Turkish government‘s [anti-Israeli/anti-Jewish] rhetoric paves the way for this, provokes Turks and spreads [hatred] to even larger masses. But there is more. “Thanks to the spread of social media, the previously ‘invisible Jew‘ is reachable now. There are laws against hate speech. But not a single person has ever been prosecuted [let alone sentenced] for threatening and insulting [Jews].”

According to a prominent Turkish Armenian, part of the blame is on Turkey’s tiny non-Muslim minorities.

Etyen Mahcupyan is a leading Turkish Armenian intellectual, writer and columnist. He has published more than 15 books and has written regular columns in Turkey’s leading liberal newspapers. Last October, Mahcupyan, one of a dwindling number of liberals keenly supporting Turkey’s Islamist government, was appointed as “chief advisor” to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. In a recent interview with Turkey’s leading daily, Hurriyet, Mahcupyan said, “Whatever has been a [political] asset for Turkey’s Armenian community (they number around 60,000) is an asset for the Jewish community too. But… there is Israel… As long as the psychology of the Israel issue continues to influence politics in Turkey and relations between the two countries do not normalize…”

The line Mahcupyan shyly did not finish probably would have gone on like this: “Turkey’s Jews will keep on paying the price.”

Turkish Armenian intellectual Etyen Mahcupyan thinks that daily attacks on Turkey’s Jews and other non-Muslims happen because they are better-educated then Muslims and have a “superiority complex.”

In a recent article, Mahcupyan, a former editor of Agos, where the slain Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink wrote, argued that Turkey’s [secularist] Jews harboured an allergy against Muslims. Mahcupyan apparently deserves his new position as “his master’s voice.”

He admits that it is the government’s responsibility to do something if Turkey’s Jews felt awfully alienated. But he thinks “there is the other side of the story.”

Mahcupyan said: “All of this [anti-Semitism in Turkey] is related to the Jewish community’s perception of Islam and the region. This is a perception that powerfully produced politics and positions. If the Armenians do not behave like them [the Jews] we can understand the historical difference between the two [Jewish and Armenian] communities.”

Apparently, Mahcupyan, the prime minister’s chief advisor, tends to blame the victim, not the criminal. “I have lived through this personally for the past 60 years,” he explains. “Among Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities, including Jews and Armenians, there is an [established] opinion about humiliating Muslims.” So, did your poor friend Dink deserve to be murdered because he humiliated Muslims?

Secondly, Mahcupyan continues, “Both Jews and Armenians are better-educated [than Muslim Turks] and more open to the West. And this brings in a feeling of superiority complex.”

To sum up, the Turkish Armenian liberal intellectual, who also happens to be advising the Turkish prime minister, thinks that daily attacks on Turkey’s Jews and other non-Muslims, including the murder of his “friend” Dink, happen because: Jews and Armenians humiliate Muslims; they are better-educated then Muslims and hence their superiority complex. Lovely!

Turkish Armenian intellectual Etyen Mahcupyan (left), an advisor to the prime minister, thinks that daily attacks on Turkey’s Jews and other non-Muslims, including the murder of his “friend” Hrant Dink (right), happen because: Jews and Armenians humiliate Muslims; they are better-educated then Muslims and hence their superiority complex.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the Ottoman state machinery produced several non-Muslim converts (the devshirme) who enjoyed higher echelons of the palace bureaucracy and finer things of life because their pragmatism earned them excellent relations with the ruling Muslim elite. It looks like the devshirme system is still alive in post-Ottoman Turkey.

First published by  The Gatestone Institute  December 23, 2014. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4970/jew-free-turkey

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily News and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Jews are ‘leaving Turkey due to safety concerns’

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TRANSLATING ISLAM: Christians and Churches Attacked in the West: Muslim Persecution of Christians, September 2014 By RAYMOND IBRAHIM

Hezi Aris — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 19:40:11 +0000

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).

The Muslim persecution of Christians in September made prominent appearances not just in the Islamic world, but also in the West—in America, Australia and Europe.

In the United States, in Columbus, Indiana, three churches were vandalized on the same night. The words most frequently sprayed were “Infidels!” and “Koran 3:151.” The verse from the Koran states, “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve [or “infidels”] for what they have associated with Allah [reference to Christian Trinity] of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

Father Doug Marcotte of Saint Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, one of those vandalized, said, “There’s a lot of bad stuff being done in the name of Allah and so when people see this happening in Columbus, whether that was truly the person’s intent or there’s something else going on, it makes people nervous. It makes people upset. It makes them scared.”

Meanwhile, in Australia, AAP reported that “Church-goers in Sydney’s west have been left shaken after a stranger shouted death threats from a car bearing the Islamic State flag. The car drove past Our Lady of Lebanon Church at Harris Park on Tuesday and witnesses claim it had a flag similar to those brandished by Islamic State jihadists hanging out the window.” A church official said the people in the car threatened to “kill the Christians” and slaughter their children: “They were strong words and people were scared of what they saw.” Witnesses saw a flag outside the window with the words, “There is only one god and Muhammad is the prophet.” And as happens frequently in Muslim-majority nations, police security was later dispatched to patrol the Harris Park church while hundreds partook of mass inside.

In Denmark—2013′s “happiest country in the world“—Christians of Middle Eastern backgrounds continued to experience “harassment, verbal attacks and in some cases direct violence from Muslims,” reports TV2, especially in Muslim-majority areas, such as Nørrebro. One Christian, “Jojo,” born in Denmark of Lebanese parents, shared her experiences. Once when sitting in her parked car, several Muslims surrounded it, harassing her about her Western attire. When one of them noticed she was wearing a cross, he said “Well, you have a cross on—then you are also a Christian f***ing whore. Do you know what we do to people like you? Do you know what we do to people like you? You get stoned [to death].”

Another Christian woman of Iranian background recounted how she and her son are harassed on the Muslim-majority block where they live—and where she stands out for not wearing a hijab, the Islamic veil: “My son is being called everything. I get called all sorts of things. Infidel. Filthy Christians. They tell me I ought to be stoned to death. My son was beaten at the bus stop. He was called pig, dirty potato (Muslim slang for Danes), and that ‘you and your mother should die.”‘

Islamic dreams of conquering Europe were prevalent. A senior analyst in Spain warned that, because Islamists see the Iberian peninsula as being “under Spanish and Portuguese occupation,” greater risk of terrorism exists there than in other Western areas. Because Iberia—or, in Arabic, Al-Andalus—was under Islamic domination for centuries, many Muslims consider it part of the Islamic world, or Dar al-Islam, which needs to be reconquered, no less than Israel, also seen as occupied Islamic territory.

More pointedly, in the Islamic State [IS], in a lengthy message partially addressed to the “crusaders”—a reference to the West—some members declared, “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah.” Members of the IS also invoked a statement attributed to Muhammad, that Constantinople would be conquered before Rome—and it was, in 1453. The implication is that the Eternal City of Rome is next.

Around the same time, Rome responded by rejecting a motion to name a street after the late Oriana Fallaci, a veteran journalist who had once written that, “the Muslim world is attempting to conquer the West in the name of Islam.” In explaining their decision, local politicians described Fallaci’s writings as containing “religious hatred,” or “Islamophobia.”

In Canada, while 80 special Muslims went to the trouble of attending a Muslim rally on behalf of persecuted Christians, another rally, an extremist Al Quds Day Anti-Israel Hate Fest, drew approximately 6,000 participants.

The rest of September’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.

Muslim Attacks on Churches

East Jerusalem: A Christian church was attacked numerous times: On September 29, young Muslim men, with ties to a Palestinian militant group, wired shut the door of the Living Bread Church and sprayed a gaseous substance at those inside. An earlier gas attack had already occurred on September 17. Hours before the second attack, someone threw a rock through one of the windows of the church, and the day before that, Sunday, September 28, a Palestinian and others assaulted a church member as he was emptying trash into a dumpster outside the church. On Sept. 21, a Palestinian militant, without warning, ran up behind a church leader, Karen Dunham, and knocked her to the pavement: “This guy charged me as fast as he could,” she said. “He came up behind me and just slammed into my back, and I fell and I hit the ground. My face is bruised. There’s bruises on the side of my cheek, on my face, on my head, on my knee, cuts on my head, and my wrist was fractured.”

Egypt: A Christian priest in Egypt appealed to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to intervene on behalf of yet another church being threatened by “religious extremists.” So far, local authorities have done nothing. Four years ago, the Coptic Church of St. Abram in Shubra al-Khaima received a permit to build an additional building. During those same four years, seven “thugs”—in the words of the report—have prevented it from being built. The “thugs” had mobilized local Muslims to threaten and demonstrate against the church. “The priest lamented that ‘after suffering many long years’ they finally managed to acquire the permit to build, but then the next obstacle presented itself in the person of the aforementioned seven ‘thugs’ who constantly harass, and incite Muslim mobs, against the church, whenever it tries to exercise its right to build the services building. Islamic law forbids the building of new churches or the renovation of existing churches.”

Iraq: Islamic State militants “completely destroyed” the ancient Green Church in Tikrit. They packed the church with explosives and detonated them – completely destroying the ancient church, which belonged to the Assyrian Church of the East. Almost from the time it was built in the seventh century, when Islam overran Iraq, the church had been attacked, ransacked, and destroyed by Muslim rulers and others, but was restored on the orders of Iraq’s late President Saddam Hussein in the 1990s.

Nigeria: Many more churches and a Christian university, Kulp Bible College, were forced to shut down as a result of the advances of the Islamic jihadi group, Boko Haram. In one instance, a pastor reported that “Boko Haram violence has been getting worse every day, and our members are fleeing the area by the thousands. Recent attacks in Borno and Adamawa states where our churches are located have seen Boko Haram take over the Army base. As a result, about 350 Christians have been killed.” Separately, in Kaduna state, where “Muslim Fulani assailants seem driven to rid the area of Christianity and use the land to graze their cattle,” according to church leaders, 46 Christians, including two pastors, were slaughtered in raids. According to an eyewitness,

Suddenly we heard sounds of gunshots around our village. The pastor was still in the pastorate when the Muslim Fulani gunmen forced their way onto the church premises. They cut him, his wife and a daughter with a machete, and then tied the hands and feet of the three of them before setting the house on fire. The three of them were burned to ashes in the living room of the pastorate. We only found the charred remains of the three of them the following morning…. The gunmen then came onto the church premises and began shooting. I heard them shouting at the top of their voices, saying they must obliterate any trace of Christianity in the town.

Although Muslim Fulani have historically had property disputes with Christian farmers, Christian leaders say attacks by the herdsmen constitute a war “by Islam to eliminate Christianity” in Nigeria.

Sudan: In the latest incident of a nearly two-year wave of church demolitions, closures and confiscations, security agents padlocked a 500-member church building, the Sudan Pentecostal Church in Khartoum. The church also houses the Khartoum Christian Center. “The church is concerned that the building might be sold by the government, which renders more than 500 worshippers to have no place for worship,” a source told the Morning Star News. The Islamist government appears to be seeking any pretext for closing churches, sources said. In this instance, the space for the church was originally designated as “office space.” But, as one source asked, “How do you close a church building that has been in operation for 20 years in the name of the church being meant for offices?” The church has a deed showing that it owns the building and property — a situation that raises the question of the government’s right to sell it. Earlier, on June 30 bulldozers demolished the Sudanese Church of Christ in the Thiba Al Hamyida area of North Khartoum as church members watched, while security personnel threatened to arrest them if they tried to block the bulldozers, church members said.

Syria: The Islamic State destroyed the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Der Zor, seen as the “Auschwitz” of the Armenian Genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in Der Zor and the surrounding desert during the genocide. In the summer of 1916 alone, more than 200,000 Armenians, mostly women and children, were massacred by Ottoman Turks. Armenia’s foreign minister issued a statement calling the church’s destruction a “horrible barbarity,” and referred to the Islamic State as a “disease” that “threatened civilized mankind.” The church was built in 1989-90 and consecrated a year later. A genocide memorial and a museum housing the remains of the victims of the genocide were also located in the church compound. Thousands of Armenians from Syria and neighboring countries gathered at the memorial every year on April 24 to commemorate the genocide.

Pakistani Rape and Dhimmitude

Four young Muslims gang raped a 15-year-old Christian girland filmed it. The girl’s father, although he was threatened against filing a complaint, went to police, who confirmed the existence of a video that corroborates the violence. The video will apparently be introduced as evidence against the youths. A lawyer, Mushtaq Gill, issued a statement that, “Many Christian girls continue to be victims of sexual assault by young Muslims, who go unpunished” and that, “in this case there is also a video, flaunted as a trophy.”
Two Christian women were abducted, forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. Lawyer Mushtaq Gill said, “A Christian girl, Sairish, forced to marry a Muslim in 2009, in her heart never abandoned the faith and continued to pray to Jesus Christ even after her marriage. After a few years she found the courage to rebel against the situation and run away…. Her life is now in danger because if she declares herself Christian, Muslims may accuse her of apostasy and the punishment would be death.” Each year, approximately 1,000 women in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. Whenever a case of this nature reaches the law courts, those women, under threat and blackmail, often declare that their conversion and marriage were decisions freely made, and the case is closed.
Another Christian family fled their hometown, Lahore, to save their daughters from forced conversion to Islam. According to the Justice and Peace Commission, the two sisters, aged 12 and 8, were studying in public schools, where learning to recite the Koran is mandatory. Apparently, because the girls recited the shehada, the Islamic declaration of faith, “an Islamic cleric, the father of a student stated that these girls had become Muslims and thus needed to be taken from their Christian parents and entrusted to adult Muslims.” The parents pulled their daughters out of school, but then the headmaster and other Muslim teachers “warned the parents to send them back to school, offering the family financial aid regarding the school fees.” The parents quit their jobs and fled the region.
Police arrested 15 Christians and booked 45 other members of the minority community under the blasphemy law for allegedly desecrating Muslim gravesin a village in Punjab province. According to the AP, “The case was registered after a local cleric filed a complaint alleging that the Christians had desecrated over 400 Muslim graves to occupy the land in Chak village in Faisalabad, about 150 kilometres from Lahore.” Rights groups said it was a spurious charge meant to prevent the Christians from acquiring the land. In fact, the accusations were later proven false.

Dhimmitude: Islamic Discrimination Against Christianity

Egypt: Iman Sarofim, a 39-year-old Christian mother of five, returned home to her family after being kidnapped. Initially it was believed that she had voluntarily converted to Islam and fled her family to be with a Muslim man. The woman contacted the family from Suez, where she had been brought by the kidnapper. The return of the woman was celebrated by neighbors and relatives in the city of Gabal al-Tir. Her disappearance had been the cause of clashes between Copts and police, who believed the narrative that she had voluntarily left. In retaliation, police officers entered the homes of dozens of Coptic families and violently arrested dozens of Christians. Separately, Ehab Karam, a Coptic dentist, was killed after he was abducted by unknown persons, most likely for ransom. The kidnapping of Copts for ransom has evidently become a regular part of life in Egypt for Christians, particularly in Upper Egypt. Last February, for instance, police dismantled a crime network that for months had been organizing kidnappings, robberies and extortion against the local Coptic community. “Unfortunately,” said the Coptic Catholic Bishop of Assist, Kyrillos William, “the phenomenon continues and there are no signs of improvement. Police operations are episodic and ineffective, they are unable to solve the problem.”

Iraq: The Islamic State decreed that all schools in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain which bore Christian names, some since the 1700s, must be changed. Also, the teaching of the Syriac language and culture and Christian religious education has been abolished. Reports indicate that the Islamic State took these moves “in order to erase all traces of cultural and religious pluralism in the conquered areas and turn schools into propaganda tools of jihadist ideology among the new generations.”

Saudi Arabia: In the Eastern Province city of Khafji, “religious police,” or agents from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, raided a house where at least 27 Christians, mostly expatriates from various Asian nationalities, were gathered. The Christians, including children, were accused of practicing Christianity in a house church, and were arrested and detained overnight. Authorities also confiscated musical instruments and copies of the Bible. The house had been placed under surveillance after a citizen reported that his Indian neighbor had converted his home into a Christian church. After witnessing a large number of individuals enter the home, officers raided the house. The only religion allowed to be practiced in public in Saudi Arabia is Islam. In the land of the prophet, no public places of worship for non-Muslims are permitted to exist.

Turkey: According to the Armenian magazine, Agos, many of the primary and secondary education books being used for the current school year still describe the Armenians and other Christian communities as enemy forces at the service of foreign powers, including Russia and England, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. One eighth-grade history book tries to whitewash the Armenian genocide, which is portrayed as a “necessary deportation,” never as a massacre.

Uzbekistan: Security forces reportedly raided the home of Pastor Stanislav Kim in Chirchik, 20 miles northeast of Tashkent, the capital. They detained 11 teenagers and three adults, who had gathered there for a volleyball game, and questioned them for more than four hours before releasing them. Officials also searched the pastor’s home and confiscated a New Testament, a Bible, several other Christian books, more than 100 slides of hymns, as well as some computer equipment. Voice of the Martyrs, which says there are at least 65 unregistered congregations scattered throughout Uzbekistan, said in a statement, “Please pray that this pastor and his son will not face fines, but will soon be acquitted of any perceived wrongdoing. Ask God to strengthen each believer who was present during this unwarranted raid so that they will not give in to governmental intimidation and pressure, but instead be emboldened to serve our Lord faithfully.”

About this Series

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic. Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that surface each month. It serves two purposes:

1) To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.

2) To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.

Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; apostasy, blasphemy, and proselytism laws that criminalize and sometimes punish with death those who “offend” Islam; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis, or third-class, “tolerated” citizens; and simple violence and murder. Sometimes it is a combination thereof.

Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the West, to Indonesia in the East—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.

Previous Reports:

First published by RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Islam Translated in Muslim Persecution of Christians on December 24, 2014. http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/christians-and-churches-attacked-in-the-west-muslim-persecution-of-christians-september-2014/

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz

Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).

Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education; he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, NPR, Blaze TV, and CBN. Ibrahim regularly speaks publicly, briefs governmental agencies, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and testifies before Congress. He is a Shillman Fellow, David Horowitz Freedom Center; a CBN News contributor; a Media Fellow, Hoover Institution (2013); and a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow, Middle East Forum. Ibrahim’s dual-background — born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East — has provided him with unique advantages, from equal fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter to the former.

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MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Muslims Must Save Islam from Islamists By TAREK FATAH

Hezi Aris — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 18:07:30 +0000

Jihadists see Western-style education of the youth as a problem worth mass murdering for.

Tarek S. Fatah is a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, a columnist at the Toronto Sun, host of a Sunday afternoon talk show on Toronto’s NewsTalk1010 AM Radio.

It seems there is no respite for the ordinary Muslim. Barely a day goes by when news of fresh atrocities by our coreligionists isn’t in the headlines.

Most of the world’s billion-plus Muslims wouldn’t dream of killing in the name of Islam, but enough do to form a critical mass that has put us on a collision course with the rest of humanity.

The Sydney siege by an ISIS-inspired jihadist had barely ended when the horrific news of a Taliban massacre killing 140 children at a Pakistani school shocked the world.

It took place at an “Army Public School”, inside a Pakistan cantonment on the edges of Peshawar. Many of the students who attended this elite school were the sons and daughters of Pakistan army officers.

Most of the world’s billion-plus Muslims wouldn’t dream of killing in the name of Islam, but enough do to form a critical mass that has put us on a collision course with the rest of humanity.

Ironically, the Taliban barbarians who killed these children were a creation of the Pakistan military, aimed at controlling neighbouring Afghanistan as a satellite state.

Why did the Taliban strike at a military school? Could it be retaliation for the recent Pakistan army campaign to expel the Taliban out of Pakistan and into Afghanistan?

That may be one reason. But knowing the workings of the worldwide jihadist terror movement and the Islamists who sow its seeds in Islamic countries and the West, there is another: the Islamist’s rejection of Western-style education systems.

The school attacked had boys and girls attending classes in what is referred to as a co-educational “English-medium” school.

The boys, smartly dressed in green blazers, white shorts and green neckties, reflect everything the Islamists despise.

And to be in the company of teenaged girls being educated at the same school would be seen as the worst of sins by those who promote Islamism, not just in Islamic countries but in Canada.

I suggest this is the “Boko Haramization” of the Pakistani jihadist movement that proclaims “western education is ‘Haraam’ (sinful)”.

Not that the Taliban have any tolerance for educating girls —Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai being one their early victims — but this attack appears to have been aimed largely at teenaged boys.

Last month, Zahid Askani, an American-educated Baloch who ran a co-educational school, where boys and girls studied English and wore western-style jackets and neckties, was assassinated by suspected jihadist death squads with the reported backing of the military.

Muslims who claim the actions of the Taliban or ISIS are not Islamic … must renounce armed jihad as unfit for our age.

Massacres are not new to Pakistan, or its military. In the last few years Pakistan’s army intelligence wing has reportedly abducted and killed hundreds of students in the Baloch Students Organization (BSO) in Balochistan who support an indigenous independence movement.

Just a day after an ISIS-sympathizer took hostages in Sydney, Australia, leading to his own death and that of two innocent civilians, the tragedy of Peshawar provides another opportunity for Muslims to recognize we have a serious problem that only we can correct.

Muslims who claim the actions of the Taliban or ISIS are not Islamic must match this rhetoric by coming together and calling for a strict separation between Islam and politics. They must renounce armed jihad as unfit for our age.

If they don’t, we will all be tarred by the actions of those who kill in the name of Islam and Allah.

The hashtag on Twitter by an Australian woman expressing solidarity with Muslims, #Illridewithyou, may please us, but it will not save us from the proverbial Dante’s Inferno.

Only we can do that, no one else.

First published by The Toronto Sun December 16, 2014. http://www.torontosun.com/2014/12/16/muslims-must-save-islam-from-islamists

Tarek Fatah is a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, a columnist at the Toronto Sun, host of a Sunday afternoon talk show on Toronto’s NewsTalk1010 AM Radio, and a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum. He is the author of two award-winning books: Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State and The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism.

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TRANSLATING ISLAM: How Western Media Enable Islamic Terrorism By RAYMOND IBRAHIM

Hezi Aris — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 20:28:31 +0000

As the West experiences a rise in the sort of terror attacks that are endemic to the Islamic world—church attacks, sex-slavery and beheadings—it is only natural that the same mainstream media that habitually conceals such atrocities “over there,” especially against Christians and other minorities under Islam, would also conceal the reality of jihadi aspirations “over here.”

As The Commentator (British publication) reports: The level of the [media] groveling after the tragic and deadly saga in Sydney Australia over the last 24 hours has been astounding.

At the time of writing, the lead story on the BBC website is of course about that very tragedy, in which an Islamist fanatic took a random group hostage in a cafe, ultimately killing two of them.

He did this in the name of Islam. But you wouldn’t get that impression if you started to read the BBC’s lead story, which astoundingly managed to avoid mentioning the words Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Muslim, or any derivations thereof for a full 16 paragraphs. The New York Times, which led by calling the terrorist, Man Haron Monis an “armed man”, waited until paragraph 11.

In The Guardian’s main story – whose lead paragraph simply referred to a “gunman” — you had to wait until paragraph 24.

If you’d have blinked, you’d have missed it. […]

In the wider media, reports about Muslim fears of a “backlash” have been all but ubiquitous.

If these are the lengths that Western mainstream media go to dissemble about the Islamic-inspired slaughter of Western peoples, it should now be clear why the ubiquitous Muslim persecution of those unfashionable Christian minorities is also practically unknown by those who follow Western mainstream media.

Western mainstream media habitually conceal the religious identity of Islamic terrorists.

As with the Sydney attack, media headlines say it all. The 2011 New Year’s Eve Coptic church attack that left 28 dead appeared under vague headlines: “Clashes grow as Egyptians remain angry after attack,” was the New York Times’ headline; and “Christians clash with police in Egypt after attack on churchgoers kills 21” was the Washington Post’s—as if frustrated and harried Christians lashing out against their oppressors is the “big news,” not the unprovoked atrocity itself; as if their angry reaction “evens” everything up.

Similarly, the Los Angeles Times partially told the story of an Egyptian off-duty police officer who, after identifying Copts by their crosses on a train, opened fire on them, killing one, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”—but to exonerate the persecution, as caught by the report’s headline: “Eyewitness claims train attacker did not target Copts, state media say.”

A February 2012 National Public Radio (NPR) report titled “In Egypt, Christian-Muslim Tension is on the Rise,” while meant to familiarize readers with the situation of Egypt’s Christians, prompts more questions than answers them: “In Egypt, growing tensions between Muslims and Christians have led to sporadic violence [initiated by whom?]. Many Egyptians blame the interreligious strife on hooligans [who?] taking advantage of absent or weak security forces. Others believe it’s because of a deep-seated mistrust between Muslims and the minority Christian community [what are the sources of this “mistrust”?].”

The photo accompanying the story is of angry Christians holding a cross aloft—not Muslims destroying crosses, which is what prompted the former to this display of Christian solidarity.

Blurring the line between victim and oppressor—recall the fear of “anti-Muslim backlash” whenever a Muslim terrorizes “infidels” in the West—also applies to the media’s reporting on Muslim persecution of Christians.

A February 2012 (British broadcasting Corporation) BBC report on a church attack in Nigeria that left three Christians dead, including a toddler, objectively states the bare bone facts in one sentence. Then it jumps to apparently the really big news: that “the bombing sparked a riot by Christian youths, with reports that at least two Muslims were killed in the violence. The two men were dragged off their bikes after being stopped at a roadblock set up by the rioters, police said. A row of Muslim-owned shops was also burned…”

The report goes on and on, with an entire section about “very angry” Christians till one confuses victims with persecutors, forgetting what the Christians are “very angry” about in the first place: nonstop terror attacks on their churches and the slaughter of their women and children.

A New York Times report that appeared on December 25, 2011—the day after Boko Haram bombed several churches during Christmas Eve services, leaving some 40 dead—said that such church bombings threaten “to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…” Such an assertion suggests that both Christians and Muslims are equally motivated by religious hostility—even as one seeks in vain for Christian terror organizations that bomb mosques in Nigeria to screams of “Christ is Great!”

Meanwhile, Boko Haram has torched 185 churches—to say nothing of the countless Christians beheaded—in just the last few months alone.

Continuing to grasp for straws, the same (New York Times) NYT report suggests that the Nigerian government’s “heavy-handed” response to Boko Haram is responsible for its terror, and even manages to invoke another mainstream media favorite: the poverty-causes-terrorism myth.

Whether Muslim mayhem is taking place in the Islamic or Western worlds, the mainstream media shows remarkable consistency in employing an arsenal of semantic games, key phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism to portray such violence as a product of anything and everything—political and historical grievances, “Islamophobia,” individual insanity, poverty and ignorance, territorial disputes—not Islam.

As such, Western media keep Western majorities in the dark about the Islamic threat, here and abroad. In short, the “MSM” protects and enables the Islamic agenda—irrespective of whether its distortions are a product of intent, political correctness, or sheer stupidity.

First published by RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Islam Translated in Muslim Persecution of Christians on December 19, 2014, 2014. http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/how-western-media-enable-islamic-terrorism/

Raymond Ibrahim

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MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Don’t Get Used to Cheap Oil By Dr. GAL LUFT

Hezi Aris — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 17:30:29 +0000

Dr. Gal Luft is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), a Washington-based think tank focusing on energy security.

The recent slump in oil prices has sent gasoline prices below $3 a gallon, leading many Americans to believe that our energy predicament is a vestige of the past. Decades of anxiety over our dependency on Middle Eastern oil with all its economic and geopolitical trappings are giving way to a new era of complacency in our energy discourse. This growing exuberance might diminish public appetite for the newly elected Congress and the Obama Administration to pursue energy policies aimed at breaking oil’s stronghold over our transportation sector. After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? But such a euphoric mindset could lead to painful consequences down the road.

In the life of every commodity there are periods of ups and downs. Oil is no different. Just like a combination of circumstances – a stronger dollar, increased supply from the U.S. and Libya, and tapering demand in the developed world – have brought about the recent price drop, a different set of drivers can lead to the exact opposite outcome. A cut in OPEC production, trouble in one or more major oil exporting countries, or a slowdown in North American production due to lower prices could reverse the recent trend, sending oil prices back to the three digit level. Predicting future prices is a loser’s game but even optimists would concur that any one of these three scenarios has a good chance of materializing in the foreseeable future.

A combination of circumstances – a stronger dollar, increased supply from the U.S. and Libya, and tapering demand in the developed world – have brought about the recent price drop.

OPEC’s recent decision against cutting crude output reveals what might lie ahead. The cartel, whose members mostly need triple digit prices to balance their budgets, essentially decided to keep prices low for now in order undermine the North American oil industry. When asked if the organization has an answer to rising US production OPEC Secretary General Abdullah Al-Badri confirmed OPEC was in a battle over market share with America: “We answered,” he said, “We keep the same production.” But while rich Persian Gulf producers can weather the storm, poorer oil exporters like Nigeria, facing contentious elections in February 2015 or Venezuela, already in a state of economic disarray, could be easily destabilized as a result of insufficient income and their production could disappear from the market for months.

Another unknown is how long North American oil producers will be able to remain competitive at sub-$70 price level especially because soon they could face headwind from an unexpected quarter. Provided the U.S. economy continues to recover, which becomes more likely with low energy prices, at some point in 2015 the Fed will begin to raise interest rates, marking the beginning of the of the era of easy money. This spells trouble for the capital intensive oil industry. Higher interest rates would make debt more expensive for American producers, cutting deeper and deeper into their profit margins – Energy debt is already the biggest component of the US junk bond market. Under such unfavorable conditions more and more producers will be forced to cap their wells and prices will begin to rebound.

At that point other factors might come into play On the demand side there is China, which despite slowing down still grows its automobile population by 12-14 percent annually. China produces today one fourth of the world’s vehicles and its vehicle fleet is projected to grow from 90 million cars today to surpass the U.S. fleet of 220 million in less than a decade. All these cars do not run on milk.

On the supply side, we will soon realize the impact of low oil prices on oil investments in the Middle East, where production costs are the lowest in the world. Even when oil prices were over $100 the Middle East accounted for only 15 percent of the total investment in oil and gas production. Low oil prices eroded the figure even further. Lower investment today means less oil tomorrow and hence higher price.

The convergence of these factors can again drive oil prices to a level in which they trigger economic recession as was the case in 1974, 1979, 1991, 2000 and 2008 – an average of once a decade. To shield the economy from the ruinous impact of future spikes in oil prices it is necessary for cars to be able to run on fuels derived from other energy commodities – coal, natural gas, biomass – in addition to, or instead of petroleum. This way, if oil returns to unfriendly territory consumers will be able to shift to cheaper fuels and hence drag the price back to equilibrium. All that is needed for this to happen is for automakers to be offered an option to reduce their fuel economy obligation – 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 – if they open most of their cars to some sort of fuel competition, whether through flex fuel engines, electric motors, natural gas engines, fuel cells etc. The abundance of choice enabling vehicles would give rise to choice in fuels and this would be the only possible insurance policy Washington can provide the American people for the next time the oil market flips.

First published in  Journal of Energy Security  December 11, 2014.

Dr. Gal Luft is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS) a Washington based think tank focused on energy security. He is a senior adviser to the United States Energy Security Council America’s highest level extra governmental energy advisory committee and co-chairman of the Global Forum on Energy Security. He specializes in strategy, geopolitics, energy security, natural resources and technology innovation. Newsweek Magazine called him a “tireless and independent advocate of energy security,” the business magazine Poder called him “one of the most recognizable figures in modern energy and security issues,” and Esquire Magazine included him in its list of America’s Best and Brightest. Dr. Luft has published numerous studies and articles on security and energy issues in various newspapers and publications such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The American Interest, Commentary Magazine, Middle East Quarterly, LA Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is co-author of Energy Security Challenges for the 21st Century (2009), Turning Oil into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice (2009) and Petropoly: The Collapse of America’s Energy Security Paradigm (2012). He is also author of Beer, Bacon and Bullets: Culture in Coalition Warfare from Gallipoli to Iraq. He appears frequently in the media and consults to various think tanks and news organizations worldwide. Dr. Luft testified before committees of the U.S. Congress, including Senate Foreign Relations, House International Relations, House Science and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He holds degrees in international relations, international economics and strategic studies and a doctorate in strategic studies from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS,) Johns Hopkins University. He is also a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Ten Ways the Mafia and Islam are Similar By RAYMOND IBRAHIM

Hezi Aris — Sat, 13 Dec 2014 17:00:04 +0000

Note: The following article was published on PJ Media where it is supplemented with clips from various mafia-related movies like The Godfather to help demonstrate the ten similarities. Portions of this article were earlier serialized on Frontpage Magazine.

During a debate on HBO’s Real Time last October, host Bill Maher declared that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.”

Maher was apparently referring to Islam’s “blasphemy” laws, which ban on pain of death any “insult”—as found in a statement, a picture, a book—to Islam and especially its prophet, Muhammad.

While Maher has been criticized for his “Islamophobic” assertion, he and others may be surprised to learn that the similarities between Islam and the mafia far exceed punishing those who say, draw, or write “the wrong thing.”

In what follows, we will examine a number of these similarities.

We will begin by looking at the relationship between Allah, his messenger Muhammad, and the Muslims, and note several parallels with the relationship between the godfather, his underboss, and the mafia.

“Muhammad: Dark Mafia,” by Imran Firasat

Next, we will examine the clannish nature of the mafia and compare it to Islam’s tribalism, especially in the context of the Islamic doctrine “Loyalty and Enmity.” For example, in both Islam and the mafia, members who wish to break away, to “apostatize,” are killed.

We will consider how the mafia and Islam have both historically profited from the “protection” racket: Islam has demanded jizya from non-Muslims under its authority/territory and the mafia has demanded pizzo from people that fall under its jurisdiction.

Finally, we will consider what accounts for these many similarities between Islam and the mafia, including from an historical perspective.

Allah and Muhammad/Godfather and Underboss

The padrino of larger mafia organizations and families—literally, the “godfather” or “boss of bosses”—has absolute control over his subordinates and is often greatly feared by them for his ruthlessness. He has an “underboss,” a right-hand man who issues his orders and enforces his will. The godfather himself is often inaccessible; mafia members need to go through the underboss or other high ranking associates.

Unlike the Judeo-Christian God … Allah is unreachable, unknowable, untouchable.

Compare this with the relationship between Allah and his “messenger” Muhammad (in Arabic, Muhammad is most commonly referred to as al-rasul, “the messenger”). Unlike the Judeo-Christian God—a personal God, a Father, that according to Christ is to be communed with directly (Matt 6:9)—Islam’s god, Allah, is unreachable, unknowable, untouchable. Like the godfather, he is inaccessible. His orders are revealed by his messenger, Muhammad.

If the Judeo-Christian God calls on the faithful to “come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), Allah says “Do not ask questions about things that, if made known to you, would only pain you” (Koran 5:101). Just follow orders.

A “Piece of the Action”

The godfather and his underboss always get a “piece of the action”—a “cut”—of all spoils acquired by their subordinates.

So do Allah and his messenger, Muhammad. Koran 8:41 informs Muslims that “one-fifth of all war-booty you acquire goes to Allah and the messenger” (followed by Muhammad’s family and finally the needy).

Assassinations

The godfather, through his underboss, regularly sends mafia men to make “hits”—to assassinate—those deemed enemies of the family.

So did Allah and his messenger. One example: A non-Muslim poet, Ka’b ibn Ashraf, insulted Muhammad, prompting the latter to exclaim, “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his messenger?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that to get close enough to assassinate Ka’b he be allowed to lie to the poet.

Allah’s messenger agreed. Ibn Maslama traveled to Ka’b and began to denigrate Islam and Muhammad until his disaffection became so convincing that the poet took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, Ibn Maslama appeared with another Muslim and, while Ka’b’s guard was down, slaughtered the poet, bringing his head to Muhammad to the usual triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!”

Circumstance is Everything

While the mafia adheres to a general code of conduct, the godfather issues more fluid orders according to circumstances.

This is reminiscent of the entire “revelation” of the Koran, where later verses/commands contradict earlier verses/commands, depending on circumstances (known in Islamic jurisprudence as al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh, or the doctrine of abrogation).

While other religions and scriptures may have contradictions, only Islam rationalizes them through abrogation—that is, by giving prominence to later verses which are seen as the “latest” decision of the deity.

Thus, whereas Allah supposedly told the prophet that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Koran 2:256), once the messenger grew strong enough, Allah issued new revelations calling for all-out war/jihad till Islam became supreme (Koran 8:39, 9:5, 9:29, etc.).

Clan Loyalty

Loyalty is fundamental in the mafia. Following elaborate rituals of blood oaths, mafia members are expected to maintain absolute loyalty to the family, on pain of death.

Similarly, mafia members are expected always to be available for the family—”even if your wife is about to give birth,” as one of the mafia’s “ten commandments” puts it—and to defend the godfather and his honor, even if it costs their lives.

Compare this to the widespread violence and upheavals that occur whenever Allah or his prophet is offended—whenever non-Muslim “infidels” blaspheme them. Or, as Bill Maher put it: “Its’ the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.”

Islam’s “Loyalty and Enmity” doctrine (al-wala’ wa’l bara’)—which calls on Muslims to be loyal to one another even if they dislike each other—is especially illustrative. Koran 9:71 declares that “The believing [Muslim] men and believing [Muslim] women are allies of one another” (see also 8:72-75). And according to Muhammad, “A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He neither oppresses him nor humiliates him nor looks down upon him…. All things of a Muslim are inviolable for his brother in faith: his blood, his wealth, and his honor”—precisely those three things that mafia members respect among each other. This is why Muslims like U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan, whose “worst nightmare” was to be deployed to fight fellow Muslims, often lash out.)

Death to Traitors

Once a fledging mafia member takes the oath of loyalty to the mafia—including the Omertà code of silence and secrecy—trying to leave the “family” is seen as a betrayal and punishable by death. Any family member, great or small, is given authority to kill the traitor, the “turncoat.”

According to Islamic law, if born Muslims at any point in their lives choose to leave Islam, they are deemed “apostates.”

Compare this to Islam. To be born to a Muslim father immediately makes the newborn a Muslim—there are no oaths to be taken, much less any choice in the matter. And, according to Islamic law, if born Muslims at any point in their lives choose to leave Islam, they are deemed “apostates”—traitors—and punished including by death. Any zealous Muslim, not just the authorities, is justified in killing the apostate (hence why Muslim families that kill apostate children are rarely if ever prosecuted).

In the words of Muhammad—the messenger (“underboss”) of Allah (“godfather”): “Whoever leaves his Islamic faith, kill him.”

Distrust and Dislike of “Outsiders”

Aside from loyalty to the family, mafia members are also expected not to befriend or freely associate with “outsiders”—who by nature are not to be trusted, as they are not of the “family”—unless such a “friendship” helps advance the family’s position.

Similarly, the second half of the doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity—the enmity (al-bara’)—calls on Muslims to maintain distance from and bear enmity for all non-Muslims, or “infidels.”

Thus Koran 5:51 warns Muslims against “taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies … whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them.” According to the mainstream Islamic exegesis of al-Tabari, Koran 5:51 means that the Muslim who “allies with them [non-Muslims] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community,” that is, a defector, an apostate, an enemy.

Similar scriptures include Koran 4:89, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 58:22; the latter simply states that true Muslims do not befriend non-Muslims—”even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin.” Koran 60:1 declares, “O you who believe! Do not take my enemy and your enemy [non-believers] for friends: would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the truth [i.e., while they deny Islam]?” And Koran 4:144 declares “O you who believe! Do not take the infidels as allies instead of the believers. Do you wish to give Allah [“godfather”] a clear case against yourselves?”

Deception and Dissimulation

As mentioned, close relations to non-mafia individuals that prove advantageous to the family (for example, collaboration with a “crooked cop”) are permissible—as long as the mafia keeps a safe distance, keeps the outsider at arm’s length.

Compare this to Koran 3:28 which commands “believers not to take infidels for friends and allies instead of believers… unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.” According to the standard Koran commentary of Tabari, “taking precautions” means:

If you [Muslims] are under their [non-Muslims’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue while harboring inner animosity for them … [but know that] Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels rather than other believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. Should that be the case, let them act friendly towards them while preserving their religion.

After interpreting Koran 3:28 as meaning that Muslims may “protect” themselves “through outward show” when under non-Muslim authority, Ibn Kathir, perhaps Islam’s most celebrated exegete, quotes Islam’s prophet (“underboss”) saying: “Truly, we smile to the faces of some people, while our hearts curse them.”

Similarly, a few years ago, Sheikh Muhammad Hassan—a leading Salafi cleric in Egypt—asserted on live television that, while Muslims should never smile to the faces of non-Muslims, they should smile, however insincerely, if so doing helps empower Islam, especially in the context of da’wa.

The idea of hating “outsiders” is apparently so ingrained in Islam that another leading Salafi cleric, Dr. Yasser al-Burhami, insists that, while Muslim men may marry Christian and Jewish women, they must hate them in their heart—and show them that they hate them in the hopes that they convert to the “family” of Islam.

(For more on the doctrine of “Loyalty and Enmity,” including references to the exegetical sources quoted above, see al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman Zawahiri’s comprehensive treatise by that name in The Al Qaeda Reader, pgs. 63-115.)

“An Offer You Can’t Refuse”

Although the novel-turned-movie, The Godfather, is fictitious, it also captures much of the mafia’s modus operandi. Consider, for example, that most famous of lines—”I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse“—spoken by the Godfather to one of his “godsons,” an aspiring actor and singer. After being turned down by a studio director for a role that he desperately wanted, the godson turned to his Godfather for aid.

As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the offer that can’t be refused consists of nothing less than violence and death threats: after the Godfather’s messenger to the director asking that the actor be given the role is again rejected, the director awakens the next morning to find the bloodied and decapitated head of his favorite stallion in bed with him. The godson subsequently gets the movie role.

Throughout history, converting to Islam has been an “offer” that countless non-Muslims could not refuse.

Throughout the context of the entire Godfather trilogy (which captures well the mafia’s approach to business) making someone “an offer they can’t refuse” means “do as I say or suffer the consequences,” possibly death.

Compare this to Islam’s threefold choice. On Muhammad’s orders, whenever Muslims conquer a territory in the name of Islam, its non-Muslim inhabitants are given three choices: 1) convert to Islam (“join the family”), 2) keep your religious identity but pay tribute (jizya, see below) and live as an “outsider,” a subjugated dhimmi or 3) execution.

Throughout history, converting to Islam has been an “offer” that countless non-Muslims could not refuse. In fact, this “offer” is responsible for transforming much of the Middle East and North Africa, which were Christian-majority in the 7^th century when the jihad burst forth from Arabia, into the “Muslim world.”

And this offer is still alive and well today. For example, several older and disabled Christians who were not able to join the exodus out of Islamic State controlled territories opted to convert to Islam rather than die.

Like the mafia, then, Islam’s offer to conquered non-Muslims (“outsiders”) is basically “join our ‘family,’ help us and we will help you; refuse and we hurt you.”

The “Protection” Racket

Once the mafia takes over a territory, one of the primary ways it profits is by collecting “protection money” from its inhabitants. While the protection racket has several aspects, one in particular is akin to an Islamic practice: coercing people in the mafia’s territory to pay money for “protection,” ostensibly against outside elements; in fact, the protection bought is from the mafia itself—that is, extortion money, or pizzo. Potential “clients” who refuse to pay for the mafia’s “protection” often have their property vandalized and are routinely threatened and harassed.

Compare the collection of pizzo with the Islamic concept of jizya: The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (emphasis added).”

In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad—in our analogy, the “underboss”—regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya from non-Muslims: “If they refuse to accept Islam,” said the prophet, “demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”

The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something. According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.”

Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to purchase their lives, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. As one medieval jurist succinctly puts it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya” (Crucified Again, p. 22).

And to top it off, just as the mafia rationalizes its collection of “protection money” by portraying it as money that buys mafia protection against “outsiders”—when, as mentioned, the money/tribute serves only to protect the client from the mafia itself—so too do Islam’s apologists portray the collection of jizya as money meant to buy Muslim protection from outsiders, when in fact the money/jizya buys protection from Muslims themselves.

Conclusion: Mafia—What’s In a Word?

What accounts for all these similarities between Islam and the mafia? One clue is found in the fact that the very word “mafia,” which means “hostility to the law, boldness,” is derived from an Arabic word, mahya, which in translation means “bragging, boasting, bravado, and swaggering.”

This etymology is a reminder that Sicily, birthplace of the mafia, was under Arab/Islamic domination for over 200 years. Aside from a borrowed etymology, could some of the mafia’s modus operandi also have been borrowed from Islam? Isolated on their island, could native Sicilians have co-opted the techniques of social controls that they had lived under and learned from their former overlords—albeit without their Islamic veneer?

The mafia is not the only historical example of a non-Muslim criminal organization to be influenced by Islam. For example, the Thuggees — whence we get the word “thug” — were a brotherhood of allied bandits and assassins who waylaid and savagely murdered travelers in India, often by first feigning friendship. Although they were later associated with the Hindu cult of Kali, the original Thuggees were all Muslim. As late as the 19^th century, a large number of Thuggees captured and convicted by the British were Muslim.

The similarities are clear: Along with assassinating his opponents, including, as seen, through treachery, Muhammad also personally engaged in banditry, ransacking the caravans of enemy tribes.

And if the words “mafia” and “thug” have Arabic/Islamic etymologies, the words “assassinate” and “assassin” are derived from a Medieval Islamic sect: the Hashashin, who pioneered the use of political assassination—with promises of a hedonistic paradise for the assassin who almost certainly died—in the name of Islam.

At any rate, when HBO personality Bill Maher recently proclaimed that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book,” he was barely touching on the similarities between the mafia and other criminal organizations, and Islam.

First published by  PJ Media  December 5, 2014.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).

The post MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Ten Ways the Mafia and Islam are Similar By RAYMOND IBRAHIM appeared first on Yonkers Tribune.

TRANSLATING ISLAM: Raping and Beheading the Faithful: Muslim Persecution of Christians, August 2014 By RAYMOND IBRAHIM

Hezi Aris — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 22:25:20 +0000

Muslims beheading Christians was a visibly growing spectacle throughout the month of August. Islamic State militants cut off a Christian man’s head—after compelling him to say the shehada, the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” When the shehada is spoken before Muslim witnesses, the speaker becomes Muslim and thus, in theory, safeguards his life and possessions from the jihad. Not so for this hapless man, who, after renouncing his Christian faith for Islam, was still slaughtered on camera (graphic video can be viewed here).

The Christian Post has the story:

Christian man publicly forced to convert to Islam in Syria under duress, before being beheaded.

A Christian man in Syria recently had his head brutally hacked off by Islamic militants after being forced to deny his faith and salute Mohammed as “the messenger of God.”

The incident was caught on video for the world to see and broadcast as a warning to “everyone like him.”

In the video that was posted to YouTube with translated captions, the helpless Christian man is surrounded by armed militants wearing masks and he is heard reciting as instructed: “There is no God but God and I testify that Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

An apparent leader in the group of militants is then heard instructing the group: “No one will shoot him now, do you understand? He will not be killed by shooting because it is merciful for him.”

“He will be beheaded because he is Kaffir, non-Muslim, sided [with] the government and was not praying at all. Everyone like him will have the same end, beheading,” said the militant.

A militant armed with a machete then grabs the defenseless man by the hair and begins to cut his head from his body as the group cries “Allahu Akbar…there is no God but God.”

Apparently inspired by the spate of beheadings conducted by the Islamic State, a female British convert to Islam who is believed to have relocated to IS controlled territories “is threatening to behead Christians with a blunt knife,” according to the Daily Mail. Umm Hussain al-Britani—formerly Sally Jones of Chatham, a member of an all-girl rock band and single mother of two—warned in messages since deleted “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at raqqa … Come here I’ll do it for you!”

In Nigeria, the Islamic group, Boko Haram, which seeks to enforce Islamic law over the whole African nation, beheaded a six-year-old boy—again, because he was Christian. During Sunday church services, over 100 Islamic militants descended upon Attagara, a Christian-majority village. With machetes and machine guns, they slaughtered men, women, and children.

According to Christian Today, “One villager, Sawaltha Wandala, was arriving at church for the second service when he saw children being massacred. One six-year-old boy had been slashed and thrown into a ditch, but he was alive. Wandala picked him up and was carrying him to a hospital in Cameroon, when he was stopped by five of the militants. The men reportedly took the child from Wandala’s arms and beheaded him, then began beating the 55-year-old with tree branches. After striking him in the head with a rock, they left him for dead.”

Another Christian man, John Yakuba, was told by Boko Haram members, “You must convert to Islam or else you will die a painful death.”

When Yakuba refused to denounce Christ, they tied his arms and legs to a tree, and hacked his hands with a knife.

“Can you become a Muslim now?” the militants asked.

“You can kill my body, but not my soul,” Yakubu cried out.

The men continued to cut his feet and back with a machete and knife to torture him.

“We will show you,” they said.

Yakuba’s head was slashed, and an axe was driven into his knee, reaching the bone.

He lost consciousness and was left tied to the tree for three days before someone found him, after which he was taken to the hospital in a coma.

In a separate attack by Boko Haram, where approximately 100 people from a Christian-majority region were killed, a survivor reported: “I thank God for sparing my life, but three of my neighbors and members of our church were killed during the attack. These Christians in our village had their throats slit with knives while their hands were tied behind their backs. Some houses were bombed as the Boko Haram gunmen were chanting, ‘God is great!’ in Arabic.”

In Kenya, militants from the Somali Al Shabaab Islamic organization abducted a group of traders near the resort island of Lamu, and drove them into a dense forest. The militants eventually released three of them, because they were Muslims, but beheaded the fourth, a Christian.

If “infidel” Christian men were beheaded, Christian women—including children—were raped and enslaved in various regions of the Islamic world.

In Iraq, approximately 1,500 Christian and other minorities not able to escape the advance of the Islamic State were gang-raped and sold as sex slaves, some for as little as $25. A joint statement by two senior UN officials declared that “Atrocious accounts of abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkomen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner.” One young woman, who managed to hide a mobile phone in the prison, spoke of horrific experiences, including being raped by dozens of men over a few hours. Other women said children born out of rape were ripped from their mothers’ arms, and never seen again.

In Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where Christians make for less than one percent, dozens of men armed with machetes, knives and iron rods attacked the convent of Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions nuns in Boldipuku), a village mission in north Bangladesh. “The nuns were beaten and molested, ending when police arrived,” reported Bishop Sebastian Tudu. According to Catholic Online, “[S]ome 60 men attempted to loot the building and rape the nuns… The attackers first tied the hands and legs of the mission’s two night watchmen and gagged them in the early morning hours …. Three PIME nuns suffered attempted rape and were sent to their provincial house in Dhaka, the national capital where they are trying to overcome the shock and mental suffering.”

And in Pakistan, yet another Christian girl, 12-year-old Muqadas (“Sacred”) was raped by a gang of Muslim men. The girl, who worked as a maid for a Muslim family, was returning home from work “when Muqadas was kidnapped by two Muslim men and three women. They took her inside a school (which was closed) and the two men, identified as Ashraf Alias Achi and Ghaffor Alias Paida raped her repeatedly in turn. The girl was later abandoned.” As usual, her family received threats of more violence for filing a complaint with local police.

According to the family’s Christian lawyer, Sardar Mushtaq Gill, “In Pakistan rape is used as an instrument of arbitrary power over Christian girls, who come from poor and marginalized families. It is a form of violence that wants to reiterate the submission to Muslims. The rest of society is not outraged because the victims mostly belong to religious minorities, who are the most vulnerable. Rarely rapists are punished. Furthermore, rape victims face terrible difficulties; they do not receive adequate medical treatment for sexual assault. Many girls are traumatized and become depressed and in need of psychological assistance.” (See here for more on the sexual abuse of Christian minors in Pakistan.) For his troubles, Gill, a vocal human rights activist who represents abused Christians, was again targeted for assassination: his home was sprayed with bullets in the night, for the second time.

Although beheadings and rape in the Islamic world may seem distant from the minds of most in the West, the exiled Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, warned the West that its turn will come. In an interview, Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona, said:

Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.

Please, try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think all men are equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.

The rest of August’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.

Muslim Attacks on Churches

East Jerusalem: Seven years of harassment and attacks by Muslims finally forced Calvary Baptist Church to leave their church building. The attacks began soon after the congregation moved into the building, located in 2007 in a predominantly Muslim area. Within 10 days of beginning meetings and worship services, a Muslim who lived near the church attacked a member with a knife. Then someone tried to set the building on fire. Next came vandalism. First, cars parked at the church were damaged, then property. Finally, some children were physically assaulted on their way to church. The congregation was finally evicted after the landlord was threatened. “How dare you do this,” he was told. “This is a disgrace to Islam. If you don’t do anything about this, we will.” The landlord eventually succumbed to the pressure and the 110-member congregation had to leave the building. This is the third church in Muslim-majority East Jerusalem to be forced shut in recent years.

France: In the early morning of August 5 at Thonon-les-Bains, a man of about 30, described as a “young Muslim,” committed major acts of vandalism in the church of Saint-Hippolyte and in the adjacent basilica of Saint-François-de-Sales. He overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras and lecterns, destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, twisted a massive bronze cross, smashed in a sacristy door and even broke some stained-glass windows. (Click for images of the destruction caused in the church.)

Iraq: Soon after the unprecedented Christian exodus from Mosul, after the Islamic State told Christians to convert to Islam or die, a human rights organization went to northern Iraq to provide assistance and support to all displaced Christians. It reported that “around 45 churches in Mosul … were destroyed and converted into mosques and centers for the Islamic State.” According to Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako “This is a humanitarian disaster. The churches are occupied, their crosses were taken down,” and up to 1,500 manuscripts, many ancient, were burnt.

Nigeria: According to Vatican Radio, “In Madagali, Boko Haram are said to have looted parish property, vandalized and then set alight buildings belonging to the church. Fr. Obasogie was not sure of the number of people killed or of other causalities in the Madagali attack but he says there are many…. Christian Churches within Maiduguri Diocese have borne much of the brunt of the terrorist activities… According to Fr. Obasogie, all Christian churches on the major road linking Maiduguri and Adamawa state have been closed after several acts of terrorism at the hands of Boko Haram sects.”

Muslim Attacks on Converts to Christianity

Iran: According to the Idaho wife of Iranian-American Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, who has been imprisoned in Iran for nearly two years, her husband has received death threats from Sunni militants from the Islamic State held in the same detention center: “He’s already under threat because he is a convert to Christianity. Now we understand that ISIS members in the prison have said he is their number one target.” The pastor is in the same ward but a separate section from the Islamic State adherents, his wife said, adding that he is afraid to leave his cell and join the general prison population in the yard for exercise. “I fear for his life,” she said, adding that the couple’s young children have submitted a video to President Barack Obama pleading with him to bring their father safely home. Separately, Pastor Matthias Haghnejad, a former Muslim, is charged with enmity against Allah, a crime that can be punishable by death, while the fate of two other Christians arrested with him remains unknown. The pastor was arrested when intelligence agents stormed his home. They arrested the church leader along with Mohammad (Vahid) Roghangir and Suroush Saraie, two other converts staying with him. The agents also seized Bibles, Christian booklets, and the pastor’s personal computer. On August 3, after being interrogated for two hours, the pastor was charged with “Moharebeh,” or “waging war against Allah,” a capital offence in Iran. All three converts have been targeted by the authorities in the past, including for “evangelism” and “actions against public security.”

Kenya: Hussein Hassan Mohammed, 30, a Muslim convert to Christianity, tearfully recounted his experiences at the hands of Muslims at Mogotio King’s Outreach Church, where he originally announced his conversion in April. He told of how he was beaten unconscious inside a mosque, how Islamic leaders had paid assassins to kill him, and how his own father tried to poison him to death (similar to the experiences of another Muslim convert to Christianity in Uganda, whose aunt tried to poison him). For a while he was arrested and tortured because authorities refused to believe that he had really converted to Christianity (they thought he was an Islamic terrorist pretending to be Christian, which happens frequently). Then, while he was recuperating in hospital, he called his father, 72-year-old Hassan Mohammed, who came to visit him at the hospital: “Are you serious about what you told me, that you had embraced the Christian faith?” his father asked, to which Hussein, replied, “Yes.” According to the Christian convert, “My father came with the food, but my conscience rejected the food. The doctors noticed that I was restless. I was told to eat the food, but I refused. The doctor tried to give the food to the cat, but it too refused to eat it, hence the food was taken to the laboratory, where it was found that it was a poisoned food.” Police guarding Mohammed arrested his father. Questioned about why he would want to kill his son, he told them, “My son has forsaken Islam as well as defiling our community by joining Christianity.” Said Hussein: “I thought my father had come to help, but I realized that he had come to kill me.” Still, when he was discharged from the hospital Hussein pled for the release of his father. Mohammed said he had forgiven his father, and police released his father.

New Zealand: Friends of Khalid Muidh Alzahrani, a Muslim convert to Christianity known as Daniel, “fear the refugee has been abducted from his Christchurch flat and taken back to Saudi Arabia—home to the Islamic holy city of Mecca—where it is against the law for Muslims to abandon their faith.” Daniel arrived in Christchurch about five years ago on a Saudi Government scholarship to study English, eventually converted to Christianity and applied for asylum. He was granted refugee status on the grounds that he would be persecuted in Saudi Arabia, and told friends he was terrified he would be kidnapped and forced to return. The Saudi ambassador to New Zealand said that Daniel had “insisted” on returning home to visit his mother and the consulate had paid for his air ticket. But, according to National, “his friends don’t believe it—they say he was last seen in the company of two strange Arab men and believe he was taken out of the country under duress, possibly by agents of the state or family members….There have been numerous documented cases of Saudi nationals being uplifted from foreign countries. In 2012, columnist Hamza Kashgari, who’d been accused of insulting the prophet Mohammad on Twitter, tried to seek asylum in New Zealand but was intercepted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, sent home and jailed without trial. In May last year, a young Saudi Christian who had arrived in Auckland two months earlier and claimed asylum was snatched off the street by three men just three days before his refugee interview and was flown back to Saudi Arabia, where it is believed he spent time in prison and was tortured. His lawyer, Roger Chambers, said the man had managed to secretly make contact with his friends in Auckland. ‘He has had a dreadful time in Saudi Arabia,” Chambers said. ‘[He was told] more than once if he did not renounce his Christianity that he could expect to be beheaded.’”

Yemen: Muslim relatives of a woman who converted to Christianity placed gasoline in one of her kitchen bottles, it caused her to catch fire while cooking breakfast for her family; eventually she died from the burns. Morning Star News reports: “In southern Yemen, Saeed woke to the sound of screaming. He shot out of bed, pushed panicked family members aside and saw his wife stumbling out of their kitchen, engulfed in flames. His wife, Nazeera, had been preparing breakfast at about 9 a.m. when she poured liquid from a cooking oil bottle into a hot pan. The liquid flashed, and the bottle exploded. While her four children watched, screaming, Nazeera was being burned alive. ‘I rushed out of the room,” Saeed (full name undisclosed for security reasons) told Morning Star News, weeping. ‘I couldn’t even speak to ask her what happened. All I could think about was putting the fire out and then getting her to the hospital. But my 16-year-old son, he couldn’t stop himself and held on to her, hugging her while she was burning. He got hurt, and I had to pull him away from her.’ About two weeks later, Nazeera, 33, died as a result of her burns. When Saeed returned to his home in a village (undisclosed for security reasons) after her death, a relative told him the unthinkable—members of both his family and hers had taken the vegetable oil out of the bottle and replaced it with gasoline. Saeed knew the reason—many years ago, the two had become Christians and refused to return to Islam.”

Dhimmitude: Islamic Discrimination Against Christianity

Libya: Roaming bands of armed Islamic militants went door to door in Tripoli’s jewelry stores. They ordered the owners to stop selling any crosses or Christian icons. “Immediately thereafter,” report Arabic media, “the store owners collected all the crosses and Christian icons and delivered them to their Christian villages outside of Tripoli. Other store owners hid the Christian crosses and icons deeply, in the hopes of transferring them somewhere later, because they live in Tripoli and have no outside Christian villages to deliver the banned Christian items to.”

United Kingdom: Yasmin Jackson, a 24-year-old Christian mother, claims staff at Kingswood Daycare Nursery in Mitcham, south London “starved” her five-year-old daughter because her packed food was not halal—that is, prepared according to Islamic custom. According to the Daily Mail: “Ms Jackson, a single mother and former nursery worker, said: ‘When I picked her up at the end of the day the first thing she said to me was, “mummy I’m really hungry, can I have my lunch now?” The mother went to speak with the manager. When she asked why her daughter was not allowed to eat her packed lunch, the manager said “We didn’t know if it’s halal.” The mother responded, “We are a Christian family and it was a chicken sandwich,” to which the manager said, “We don’t allow any non-halal meat in the nursery.”

About this Series

1) To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.

2) To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.

First published by RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Islam Translated in Muslim Persecution of Christians on December 10, 2014. http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/raping-and-beheading-the-faithful-muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2014/

Previous Reports:

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MIDDLE EAST FORUM: Will Even Oman Now Face Turmoil? By MICHEL GURFINKIEL

Hezi Aris — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 21:50:57 +0000

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think tank in Paris, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Will Oman survive the end of Sultan Qaboos? The 74-year-old ruler, who modernized the country and kept it safe from most Middle East turmoil for almost half a century, is said to be terminally ill. His birthday — the sultanate’s national holiday — was not celebrated last month. And Qaboos is childless.

He has selected three of his closest relatives as potential heirs. The final choice will be made by the Royal Family Council. Should any problem arise, the matter will be settled by the National Defense Council.

Upon landing in Muscat, the capital city, visitors immediately realize that Oman is very different from other Gulf countries. Forget the skyscraper extravaganzas of Kuwait City, Manama, Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. By law, buildings in Muscat must be built in stone or similar traditional materials, and must follow a low-rise, castle-like architectural pattern. Forget also the other states’ apartheid-style system of Bedouin minorities lording over majorities of immigrant workers: in Oman, 70% of the 3.2 million inhabitants are native citizens.

As the sultan lay terminally ill with no children, the quietest country in the Middle East faces a crisis of succession.

Oman differs from its neighbors in many more ways. While the other Gulf countries are tiny enclaves no larger than New Jersey or even Rhode Island, Oman is big: 309,000 square kilometers, the size of Kansas, or Poland. Admittedly, the hinterland is chiefly mountains and semi-desert. Still, there is a sense of strategic width, and strategic security.

While the other Gulf countries interact out of geographical necessity with the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia), the Fertile Crescent (Iraq and Syria), and Persia (the Islamic Republic of Iran), Oman is an Indian Ocean country. The hinterland’s mountain ranges effectively sever it from the peninsula. The monsoon winds have allowed the local population, from time immemorial, to trade with India and East Africa, and even to establish distant colonies like Zanzibar. And throughout the past 500 years, the Omanis have been in touch with the European maritime powers: first the Portuguese, from the 16th century on, and then the British in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Even more stunning is Oman’s religious singularity: most inhabitants do not belong to Sunni or Shiite Islam. They follow a third way, Ibadism, an offshoot of Kharijism, which is also to be found in parts of North and East Africa.

Just like the early American Puritans, the Ibadis are both more strictly religious than the Sunnis and the Shiites, and much more tolerant and open-minded in political, social, and even intellectual matters. They have usually promoted good relations with Jews, Christians, and even Hindus. Moreover, they have comparatively democratic tendencies: they know not of hereditary kings-caliphs or hereditary imams, but rather of elected imams and secular kings or sultans.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Oman had lost its naval and commercial edge, and was so impoverished that the British did not even attempt to turn it into a full-fledged protectorate. It was ridden with civil wars between imams based in the hinterland, and the Al-Said, a royal family based in Muscat. In the 1950s, Sultan Said bin Taimur suppressed the last imamate rebellion with British help, and set up a reactionary and isolationist rule. In the 1960s, however, a new rebellion flared up further south in the Dhofar province, a bizarre mix of tribal unrest and Marxist rhetoric.

Qaboos’ priority, in strategic and international terms, was to keep his country independent from any foreign interference and at peace with every nation.

Qaboos ibn Said, Sultan Said’s English-educated son, took over in a bloodless coup in 1970 and gradually suppressed the Dhofar insurgency, with much help from Britain, imperial Iran, and Pakistan. He then embarked on a resolute, if cautious, modernization program, supported by increasing oil revenues. Oman’s GNP is now 90 billion dollars. The average income per capita is 30,000.

Qaboos’ priority, in strategic and international terms, was to keep his country independent from any foreign interference and at peace with every nation. He very adroitly balanced American influence with strong British ties, and Saudi regional power with Iranian links. Many American-Iranian conversations, from Reagan to Obama, took place in Oman.

Qaboos would have welcomed a complete peace between Israel and the Arab and Islamic world, and he knew that the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat or Hamas was not helpful in that respect. In the fall of 1993, he attended a discreet, high-level academic and political conference in the United States, where the Oslo Accords and many other issues were discussed. He listened politely when a European journalist of Jewish origin attempted to vindicate Israel’s decision, and then left. One of his aides stayed, however, and bluntly told the orator: “The Arabs will never forgive Israel for bringing back so prominently the Palestinians on the Middle East’s scene.”

The sultan’s shortlist for his successor is said to include Prince Fahd bin Mahmud Al Said, the acting prime minister; Prince Shehab bin Tariq Al Said, the minister of science; and Prince Haitham bin Tareq Al Said, the culture minister. Sources say, however, that General Sultan bin Mohamad Al-Naamani, the head of the royal administration, will be the real kingmaker. And perhaps the next king.

First published by the  PJ Media  on December 8, 2014.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-thank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.

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BREAKING NEWS: Syrian State TV Asserts Israel Has “Launched Airstrikes” Near Damascus Airport

Hezi Aris — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 16:26:40 +0000

YONKERS, NY – December 7, 2014 — Syrian military sources have advised and confirmed to the Russian international news agency RIA Novosti (РИА Новости) that “the Israeli enemy committed aggression against Syria by targeting two safe areas in Damascus province, in all of Dimas and near the Damascus International Airport,” adding that there were no casualties. The alleged attack was reported by Syria’s official SANA news agency and by Lebanon’s Beirut-based Shiite terror group’s official television station al-Manar, that Israeli jets bombed areas near the smaller airport at Dimas, a town situated northwest of Damascus near the Lebanese border, bringing about 10 explosions

Israeli Air Force action has yet to be confirmed or denied by the Israeli government.

Green lemon@green @lemonnn #Syria Alleged picture of Israeli airstrike near Damascus via @IsraelHatzolah

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