The Arab Spring and the Persecution of Christians: A Open Letter to President Obama

While the Western Media is still celebrating the Arab Spring and promoting another Western intervention on behalf of Syria’s Arab Spring, there is a lot of victimization that it refuses to cover. Muslim-turned-atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, reports:

• We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

• The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

• The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

• But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.

• As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have “lost the protection of their societies.” This is especially so in countries with growing radical Islamist (Salafist) movements. In those nations, vigilantes often feel they can act with impunity—and government inaction often proves them right. The old idea of the Ottoman Turks—that non-Muslims in Muslim societies deserve protection (albeit as second-class citizens)—has all but vanished from wide swaths of the Islamic world, and increasingly the result is bloodshed and oppression. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/05/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-global-war-on-christians-in-the-muslim-world.print.html

The Arab spring in Syria, through which the Sunni majority has been trying to wrestle the power away from the Shiite leadership, has proved to be a Winter for its Christian minority. The UK-based Barnabus Fund reports:

• “Christians in Syria targeted in series of kidnappings and killings: 100 dead.”

World Magazine reports that,

• If opposition forces take control of Syria, that aggression could grow worse and threaten one of the last sizable populations of Christians in the Middle East. (Feb. 25, 2012, 42-43)

In contrast to Western Media, Open Doors USA, via World, reports that,

• Syrian Christians are increasingly afraid to leave their homes…Several Muslim taxi drivers vowed to harm all women customers who are unveiled…[One worker stated that] “These women, mostly less orthodox Muslims and Christians, are being kidnapped, raped, or even killed.”

• Virginia-based Jubilee Campaign also reports that Syrian protesters are targeting Christians: “The culmination of these protests end in raids on Christian communities to take women from their homes and families and rape them.” Greg Treat of the Jubilee Campaign elaborated, saying that sources say extremists appear on Syrian television encouraging Muslims to kill Christian women.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has demanded Bashar al-Assad to step down in favor of a “democratic future for Syria” and possibly arming the “popular” uprising. However, the promised imposition of Shariah Law does not comport with a “democratic future” or even the “human rights” to which this administration has committed itself.