- “Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are, like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just! The responsibility of a bishop is to teach, to use his influence to transmit truth.” — Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, Syria.
- Federal authorities arrested Khalil Abu-Rayyan of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, an ISIS supporter who had planned to carry out an attack on a 6,000-member Detroit church. Abu-Rayyan allegedly had guns and a large knife, and told an undercover FBI agent that he “tried to shoot up a church one day … If I can’t do jihad in the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here. … It is my dream to behead someone.”
- In Pakistan, a disabled Christian man sentenced to death for blasphemy said that he was forced into admitting to the charges in order to stop his wife from being tortured… Emmanuel and his wife were found guilty of insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in text messages to a local imam in 2013, and sentenced to death. The conviction came despite the fact that the poor Christian couple are illiterate.
As opposed to their Western counterparts, Christian leaders who live in the Middle East continued expressing their frustration at the West’s indifference and worse. Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, during an interview, asked “Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are, like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just! The responsibility of a bishop is to teach, to use his influence to transmit truth. Why are your bishops afraid of speaking? Of course they would be criticized, but that would give them a chance to defend themselves, and to defend this truth. You must remember that silence often means consent.”
The archbishop also criticized the migration policies of Western countries: “The egoism and the interests slavishly defended by your governments will in the end kill you as well. Open your eyes, didn’t you see what happened recently in Paris?”
Similarly, in Iraq, Christian representatives invited to participate in the “Conference on the Protection of Peaceful Coexistence” — the sort of conference that would be heavily attended, praised, and cited by Christians in the West — boycotted the event on the grounds that such government-sponsored events are purely for show and nothing comes of them. “What need is there in participating in meetings like this and repeating the formulas that give the title to the conference if then one does not see initiatives and changes in concrete terms?” said Chaldean Patriarch Raphael Louis I. Other non-Muslim religious minorities, including the Yazidis and Mandaeans, also boycotted the conference.
The Chaldean Patriarch went on to launch an appeal to government authorities and political and religious leaders to denounce the continuing legal discrimination and sectarian bullying suffered by Christians: “We met with government officials, and paid a visit to some of the Islamic religious authorities to talk about what we have in common, with regards to our faiths and the life we share in this land. During these meetings, we assured our loyalty to Iraq, which is our country, and we do not seek revenge, we want to live in peace with all Iraqis. Unfortunately, none of their promises has become reality.”
January’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Muslim Persecution of Christian Churches
USA: Federal authorities arrested a Michigan man believed to be an ISIS supporter who had planned to carry out an attack on a 6,000-member Detroit church. Khalil Abu-Rayyan, 21, of Dearborn Heights, allegedly had guns and a large knife, and told an undercover FBI agent that he “tried to shoot up a church one day.” “I bought a bunch of bullets. I practiced reloading and unloading,” he said in an online conversation. Investigators did not specify which church Abu-Rayyan was eyeing, but said it has a capacity of 6,000 members. In conversations with an undercover agent, he said, “If I can’t do jihad in the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here.” He also had armed himself with a knife and told the undercover agent, “It is my dream to behead someone.”
Bangladesh: Catholic nuns were attacked on two separate occasions. In the early morning hours of February 7, around 15 masked, armed men broke into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, and its adjacent Catechist Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent, in Chuadanga. They vandalized the convent’s chapel, desecrated the Eucharist, slapped a nun around, and looted over $8,000 as well as other valuables. A few days later in Tumilia, 12 men broke into St. Mary’s Catholic Mother Care Center, a hospital clinic founded in 1933, and stole some items. “They broke down the door of my room,” said Sister Mary, “and were armed. They threatened me and asked where I held the money. I had no other choice, I gave them all the cash we had.” According to Theophil Nokrek, secretary of the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace, the two recent attacks “are not isolated incidents. Some groups are trying to harm our Christian community. They are doing so with premeditated actions. The government should protect us adequately.” He added that a few days earlier in the same district a Christian micro-credit bank was also robbed.
Kosovo: Four ethnic Albanians were arrested near the Serbian Orthodox monastery, Visoki Decani, a UNESCO world heritage site. Two of the suspects wore beards and were dressed in Salafi garb. A Kalashnikov rifle with ammunition and a pistol, as well as some extremist jihadi books, were found in their car. One of the suspects was later found to have an ISIS flag in his house. More than a year earlier, in October 2014, ISIS graffiti was sprayed on buildings belonging to the monastery. Even so, Kosovo police said the four men had no intention to attack the monastery and had no links to terrorism; Albanian media accused the monastery of exaggerating the threat. One month earlier, Muslims had urinated in an Orthodox Christian church in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.
Turkey: On February 18, authorities ordered four Christian congregations to vacate the church building they shared. The Christians were given until February 26 to comply—eight days. Built in the 1880s, the building, which accommodated as many as 200 people, had, since 2004, been shared by four different Christian denominations for their Sunday worship. Due to protests against the decision, on February 23 authorities withdrew the order. Discussing this incident, Turkish academic Aykan Erdemir said, “Christians do not have any legal entitlement to the building. They only have usage rights for the time being, which I think is a very precarious situation …. Members of non-majority religions have to depend on the goodwill of bureaucrats and the majority population.”
Muslim Violence Against and Slaughter of Christians
United States: Police shot and killed a Muslim man of Somali background after he attacked several people with a machete at Nazareth Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. The restaurant is owned by a pro-Israel Arab Christian. Thirty-year-old Mohamed Barry walked into the restaurant, had a conversation with an employee and then left. He returned a half hour later, went up to a man and a woman who were sitting at a booth just inside the door, and started slashing. Four people were injured. Law enforcement said the man had traveled to the Middle East in 2012 and that the incident appears to be the type of “lone wolf terrorist attacks they’re trying to stop.” Even so, Columbus police Sgt. Rich Weiner said, “right now there’s nothing that leads us to believe that this is anything but a random attack.”
Recalling the incident, a waitress said, “He looked straight at me, but he went over to the booths and just started going down the booths. It all seemed to happen in slow motion.”
Karen Bass, another eyewitness, said, “He came to each table and just started hitting them. There were tables and chairs overturned there was a man on the floor bleeding there was blood on the floor. I fell like five times. My legs felt like jelly. I just thought he was going to come behind me and slash me up.” After the attacks, Barry fled in his car but was chased by police and cornered. With a knife in one hand and a machete in the other, Barry got out of his car and lunged across the hood at the officers before he was shot dead.
In Columbus, Ohio, Mohamed Barry, a Muslim man of Somali background, attacked several people with a machete at Nazareth Restaurant — a business owned by a pro-Israel Arab Christian. Police later shot and killed Barry when he lunged at them with a machete and knife.
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Kenya: In a pre-dawn raid on a predominantly Christian area, the Somalia-based Islamic jihadi group, Al Shabaab, killed at least four Christians, one of whom was beheaded. According to a Christian who was shot in his hand but survived, there were five or six heavily-armed assailants speaking Somali and dressed in military uniforms. They shot two Christians dead, hacked and beheaded another and killed yet another by setting his house on fire. “I could not understand them, so they shot me in my hand, but I managed to escape while a neighbor who was with me was beheaded by the other attackers…. As I fled for my life, bleeding, I could see two houses burning. Those who were attacked are Christians. I am very sure that the attackers were looking for Christians… This is the third time the area has been attacked, and we have lost several Christians.”
Egypt: Another young Coptic Christian conscript allegedly committed suicide in his unit in Menufia. According to Maj. Gen. Muhammad Mas’ud, the 20-year-old, known only as Michael, “shot a bullet from his firearm into his chest, dying instantly.” He supposedly killed himself “after receiving a phone call from his home,” said Mas’ud. Lawyer Hani Ramses remarked that “It’s new for us constantly to hear about Coptic recruits killing themselves in the military and police stations. It’s especially strange that it’s happening now, and not previously, when Egypt was often in a state of war and under constant threat… The killing of Coptic conscripts in the military has become a [new] phenomenon.” (Read here for several more accounts of Coptic Christians being killed in their military units under “mysterious circumstances,” such as supposed suicide.) The lawyer also wondered if these deaths indicate that “extremist groups” have infiltrated the Egyptian military.
Muslim Attacks on Christian Freedom: No to Apostasy and Blasphemy
Italy: A report said that more than one thousand Muslim converts to Christianity currently living in Italy are hiding their conversions for fear of violent retaliation from the Muslim community.
One of them, a 55-year-old Egyptian chemical engineer who now works a waiter, said he had been a fervent Muslim who was converted to Christianity and baptized in Italy after the death of his mother three years ago. The man, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution from Muslims, stated that the decisive element in his conversion came from seeing Christians with “a humanity more complete than mine.” He openly expressed his frustration about having to hide his newfound faith. “I cannot openly practice my Christian faith. I am afraid that some fanatical Muslim may do harm not only to me, but especially to relatives who remained in Egypt…. How is it that Italians who convert to Islam can go on TV and talk about it, and instead I have to hide to avoid retaliation?”
Uganda: A Muslim imam known as “the malaria of Christianity” was arrested in connection with the killing of a 28-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity. Laurence Maiso’s body was found on January 27 at his own house, his head in a pool of blood. Four days earlier, Imam Kamulali Hussein had met his wife and him on a local road. According to Maiso’s wife, the imam told him, “You have refused to join us. Do you know that Allah does not want us to have a kafir [infidel] neighbor? And you should know that Allah is about to send to you the Angel of Death in your house. Please prepare to meet him at any time.” Four days after this warning, Maiso’s wife went out of the home and returned to find her husband dead on the floor. A neighbor said that on the day of the murder she saw eight men—including Imam Hussein—coming out of Maiso’s house. On several earlier occasions other Muslims had confronted Maiso and demanded that he recant his Christian faith. The killing is the latest in a series of attacks on Christians. On December 23, 2015, a pastor was hacked to death as he and other church members resisted an effort by Muslims to take over their land. And less than a week earlier, five underground Christians, including a pregnant mother, in a predominantly Muslim village, died from a pesticide put into their food after a Bible study.
Pakistan: A disabled Christian man sentenced to death for blasphemy said that he was forced into admitting to the charges in order to stop his wife from being tortured: “There is no man who can stand to see his wife being tortured by police, so to save my wife, I confessed,” Shafqat Emmanuel said in his appeal. Emmanuel and his wife were found guilty of insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in text messages to a local imam in 2013, and sentenced to death. The conviction came despite the fact that the poor Christian couple are illiterate, witnesses are offering contradicting testimonies against them, and evidence that the blasphemous text messages could not have been sent by from the phone of the Christians.
Kenya: A Christian of Somali descent was last reported unable to see or eat after Muslim relatives beat him unconscious on his way to church service, Sunday, February 7, outside Nairobi. Relatives told 26-year-old Hassan that they ambushed him because they had learned that he and others were holding mid-week Christian devotional times in their home. “They hit me with a blunt object, and I fell down bleeding. Then they stepped on my stomach, and while I was struggling, another hit me on my head [with the blunt object]. I was not able to know what happened after that point. I just woke up to find my mother screaming for help.”
One of the assailants had told Hassan, “You have been deceiving us that you have been having a ‘family meeting’ – we have found out that you have been conducting Christian activities, which is against our family tradition of being a Muslim family.” Hassan declined to name the relatives, saying he feared they would kill him. Somalis generally believe all Somalis are Muslims by birth and that consequently any Somali who becomes a Christian can be charged with apostasy, but Hassan was raised Christian from childhood.
Dhimmitude
United States: The Principal of the Bruce Vento Elementary School in St. Paul, Minnesota, Scott Masini, banned the celebration of Valentine’s Day, a move that accords with Islamic teaching. As St. Valentine’s Day has its origins in the Christian religion, it is banned throughout the Muslim world. In a letter to parents, Masini said that, “my personal feeling is we need to find a way to honor and engage in holidays that are inclusive of our student population.” He went on to explain that the holiday was cancelled as it violates some students’ religious beliefs: “I have come to the difficult decision to discontinue the celebration of the dominant holidays until we can come to a better understanding of how the dominant view will suppress someone else’s view.” He added that the school would also no longer celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, as celebrating those holidays “is encroaching on the educational opportunities of others and threatening the culture of tolerance and respect for all.” Several parents were unhappy with the decision. One parent on the school’s Facebook page wrote, “Very sad. All the fun is gone.” Another wrote, “Tired of the PC. Totally ridiculous.”
Germany: All throughout asylum centers, Muslim migrants are tearing up Bibles, assaulting Christians, sexually abusing women and children, and beating up homosexuals, reported the German newspaper, Die Welt. Yazidi girls who were formerly used as sex slaves by the Islamic State are housed in secret locations in Germany, in order not to attract unwanted attention from migrants sympathetic to the Islamic State or Muslims who view them as nothing more than sexual objects. More than a thousand of these women live in various special shelters across Germany.
Malaysia: Catholic school pupils are being pressured to convert to Islam, according to Sister Rita Chew, president of the Educational Commission of the Archdiocese of Kota Kinabalu. She partially attributed this new pressure to increasingly aggressive Muslims in schools run by the Church: “Some people seem very interested in bringing forward Muslim programs in our elementary schools.” Local sources said that Islamic proselytism activities take place in all schools of the country—including Catholic and Christian institutions. Several episodes also show a widespread prejudice against non-Muslim students, noted the sister, adding “Our fear comes from the fact that conversions take place, but the government denies this fact. Some Christian parents have found that their children are taught Islamic prayers.”
Egypt: For the second time, Mervat Seifein, a Christian school teacher, was rejected by students in her school in Minya, Upper Egypt, simply for being Christian. On February 8, Seifein was promoted to school director of Beni Mazar Secondary Girls’ School. It was a routine promotion in which she replaced the previous school director, a Muslim. But students—joined by some teachers—protested and held a sit-in in the school courtyard demanding her removal. “We don’t want a Copt,” they shouted. Police were not able to disband the boys’ demonstration in the school courtyard. Seifein said “The girls who demonstrated against me don’t know me, so why the antagonism? Simply because I am Coptic [Christian]? The only explanation I can fathom is there has been fanatic incitement going on against my promotion, possibly by persons who are purely extremist or who have an interest in keeping me out of that post.” This is not the first such incident. According to Ezzat Ibrahim, a Minya activist who demanded that a prompt official investigation be conducted,
“This is flagrant religious discrimination. It brings to mind the incident in the southern province of Qena when the Islamists rose against the appointment of a Coptic governor in the past-Arab Spring weeks in 2011, and the State gave in and went back on the appointment. It is catastrophic that some 50 or 100 teenage girls or boys should impose their will on the State. And it is equally disastrous that these students were pushed to do so by a group of fanatic Islamists. The positive official response to their preposterous demands amounts to an invitation for religious discrimination. The deputy minister who did that must be dismissed.”
Separately, more than 150 Coptic Christians staged a sit-in protest at the provincial administration office in Minya, to spread awareness for the continued kidnappings of Christians across the country. The protest specifically highlighted the case of an 18-year-old Christian girl who was kidnapped a few days earlier. “Kidnappings that target Christians remain a scourge for the Coptic community in many areas of Egypt. Already several appeals have been launched by Christian organizations to Egyptian authorities, including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to take so that adequate measures are taken to combat this phenomenon,” added the report. Several kidnappings have ended in the murder of the hostages.
Pakistan: Tahira, 21, and Reema Bibi, 20, two Christian women, were abducted last December from near their home in Sargodha (Punjab) while walking together from work. Two Muslim men apparently seized the two women, raped them and then forcibly married them. Afterwards, they kept them segregated in their Islamabad home. On February 11, Tahira managed to escape. Her Muslim “husband,” however, filed a complaint with police, who immediately arrested six members of her Christian family. The relatives were released thanks to pressure from human rights groups, but the authorities have ordered the family to return Tahira to her kidnapper-rapist-husband. According to human rights activists, these are common experiences for Christian girls and their families in Pakistan. Even if a case goes to court, the victims are always threatened and pressured by their “husbands” to declare that their conversion was voluntary. Victims are often sexually abused, forced into prostitution, and suffer domestic abuse or even wind up as victims of human trafficking. Those who try to rebel are told that they “are now Muslims and that the punishment for apostasy is death,” noted the report.
Separately, a man refused to renounce Christ, despite being tortured by Muslim co-workers who tried to convert him to Islam. Patras Hanif, a construction worker and father of five, said he was targeted because of his Christian faith. His co-workers tried to pressure him into converting, even threatening false blasphemy charges. “They very often called me ‘kafir,’ which means unfaithful [“infidel”], and they threatened me that they would resort to false accusations of blasphemy if I refused to convert to Islam. A blasphemy charge in Pakistan is very serious and usually results in the death penalty,” noted Hanif.
According to Hanif’s lawyer, “This is the suffering Christians in Pakistan go through. Islamic extremist groups would like to eliminate Christianity and other religions.”
Jordan: Official school curricula intentionally omit and distort Christian history in the region. This came out in Amman, during a conference entitled, “Toward a Complete Strategy to Combat Extremism,” hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Political Studies. Dr. Hena al-Kaldani, a Christian, said that “there is a complete cancelation of Arab Christian history in the pre-Islamic era” and “many historical mistakes” in the school curriculums of Jordan. Al-Kaldani asserted that “there are unjustifiable historic leaps in our Jordanian curriculum,” meaning that centuries’ worth of Christian history is bypassed or suppressed. He said that, for example, “10th grade textbooks omit any mention of any Christian or church history in the region.”
Textbooks completely ignore historic Christian figures of importance and make no mention of Jerusalem’s Christian sites, while giving detailed accounts about Islamic sites, he added. That the original inhabitants of Petra, the Nabateans, were once pagans who converted to Christianity is also omitted. Wherever Christianity is mentioned, omissions and mischaracterizations proliferate. One Arabic language textbook uses the phrase, “Man shall not live by bread alone” without attributing it to Christ or the Bible. Christianity is primarily mentioned as a Western (that is, “foreign”) source of colonization, said al-Kaldani.
