And Some Call it “Islamophobia”

Perhaps just as revealing as what the media reports are the stories that it refuses to report. Sometimes, the media is cowered into silence by charges of “Islamophobia.” (Once in a while, the media will courageously take a stand.)

This tendency is most clearly demonstrated by the medias’ refusal to acknowledge the extent of the Muslim genocide of Christians - Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan are most newsworthy.

One step down from this is the reluctance of Western Europe to report on the explosion of Anti-Semitism within their midst. Wikipedia reports:

• Antisemitism has increased significantly in Europe since 2000, with significant increases in verbal attacks against Jews and vandalism such as graffiti, fire bombings of Jewish schools, desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. Those incidents took place not only in France and Germany, where antisemitic incidents are the highest in Europe but also in counties like Belgium, Austria and the United Kingdom. In those countries, physical assaults against Jews including beatings, stabbings and other violence, increased markedly, in a number of cases resulting in serious injury and even death. Moreover, the Netherlands and Sweden have also had consistently high rates of antisemitic attacks since 2000….A large number of violent antisemitic attacks in Europe were done by Muslims. 

These Muslim attacks have also received encouragement from their host nations that routinely accuse Israel of crimes against the Palestinians. Even more recently, it is reported that:

• Although the full study is not due to be released until October, the salient facts have been summarized by EU officials and by researchers like Dov Maimon, a French-born Israeli scholar at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Among the findings: more than one in four Jews report experiencing anti-Semitic harassment at least once in the twelve months preceding the survey; one in three have experienced such harassment over the past five years; just under one in ten have experienced a physical attack or threat in the same period; and between two-fifths and one-half in France, Belgium, and Hungary have considered emigrating because they feel unsafe. Statistics from my native France, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, go back farther in time and tell an even darker tale. Since 2000, 7,650 anti-Semitic incidents have been reliably reported to the Jewish Community Security Service and the French ministry of the interior; this figure omits incidents known to have occurred but unreported to the police. 

The Jews are not just considering emigration, they are actually in flight and in droves. Surprisingly, I could not find any stats detailing the extent of Jewish emigration from Western Europe. However, in an article dated March 14, 2013, the Tablet Magazine gave some indication of the extent of French Jewishemigration:

• A few weeks ago, an article chronicled the growth of a French Jewish community in the United Kingdom. To accommodate the influx, St. John’s Wood Synagogue in London started hosting French-language Shabbat services. Here’s one about the French Jews arriving in Israel at a rate of 2,000 per year. 

This is human suffering of immense and ongoing proportions, and the media is largely ignoring it along with the Western governments, which seem to be more interested in ensuring that everyone has access to condoms. Even Jewish groups are hardly raising a whisper.

Perhaps Islam does constitute a threat that needs to be identified. However, this is the very thing that the West is trying to prevent. Currently, France is bringing criminal charges against a journalist for questioning Islam.

However, if Islam is bent on imposing Shariah Law wherever it goes, thereby either subjugating or killing everyone else, as many Koranic verses actually require, then this must be confronted. As the situation now stands, it’s like trying to counteract the bubonic plague without first being allowed to identify the problem.

Neville Chamberlain and the Naïve Media

We believe what we want to believe, and the media is little different. Jonathan Rosenbloom described how the press and the BBC fawned over their gullible Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his politics:

• That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss [the German forced merger with Austria in 1938], British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps, or the Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers, and professors to scrub the streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked Neville Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing “Jewish-Communist propaganda.” (Jewish World Review)

Instead, today we are called “Islamophobes” if we raise any question about the Islamic agenda for world domination and the subjugation of all others. However, in both cases, the evidence is unmistakably before us. Rosenbloom wrote that Chamberlain probably never read Mein Kampf, but he certainly should have:

• Hitler laid out in startling fashion both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest.

We find the same battle plan laid out in detail in the Koran and the Hadiths (the sayings of Mohammad), but yet the Western media continues to refer to Islam as a “religion of peace” and that the Islamic terrorists aren’t real Muslims, despite their unequivocal declarations to the contrary.

Chamberlain and the press clung to a hope, albeit unsupported by any evidence:

• Chamberlain…”could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality.” For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland. France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail.

However, we are giving Islam even greater encouragement. We invite radical Islamic groups to our White House, employ them in our Homeland security, sponsor pro-Islamic propaganda, bellow out that  “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” and list Evangelicals and Catholics as terrorist groups. We have never seen a red carpet unfurled so elaborately. We should not be surprised when our carpet is trodden under.

Genocide and the Conspiracy of Silence

Some atheists are not blinded by their presuppositions. One atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, has made some balanced assessments that few Westerners can or are willing to make:

·        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.

And there is a “conspiracy of silence,” despite the denials of the many PC voices, which hypocritically sound out about their own moral crusades, while they deny the dead bodies piling up around them.

Christian Oppression and Our Responsibility

According to Christianity Today, “An average of 159,960 Christians worldwide are martyred for theirfaith per year.”

Author Toby Westerman adds:

• A silent holocaust of Christian martyrs is taking place around the world. While individual instances of murder and mayhem are sometimes reported, the general pattern of violence is ignored by the media, the United Nations, and most national governments. The perpetrators belong primarily to one of two groups: fundamentalist Islamists or Communist-controlled governments.

Westerman lists some examples of this holocaust from 2009 and before:

• The burning of several Catholic Churches in Malaysia, the deaths of Coptic Christians shot following midnight Mass outside their church, police raids in Saudi Arabia against private prayer groups, all testify to the type of "toleration" employed by Muslim fundamentalists.

• In Egypt, allegations that a Christian man raped a Muslim woman resulted in the murder of seven Coptic Christians and an attempt to kill the area's Coptic bishop. The deadly assault took place about 60 miles from the ancient temple site of Luxor, a popular tourist attraction.

• In Saudi Arabia, a nation where no Christian church is allowed, the country's religious police are ever on the alert for non-Muslim religious activity, including private expressions of prayer. Private group Bible readings and praying run afoul of strict religious edicts. Even Filipino guest workers, who perform menial tasks for wealthy Saudi families, are in danger if they attempt to pray as they did in their homeland.

• While instances of Muslim persecution of Christian believers are documented from Nigeria to Indonesia, no where is Christian martyrdom more tragic and ironic than in post-Saddam Iraq. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 the Christian population was estimated at about one million. Unfortunately for Christians, the post-Saddam era gave the Muslim majority a taste of democratic rule without the American provisions of a popularly accepted version of the U.S. Bill of Rights. Unrelenting attacks on Iraqi Christians have caused between 400,000 and 500,000 Iraqi Christians to flee Iraq, and many of those remaining are internal refugees - displaced citizens in their own nation, fearful of returning to their homes.

And now the Western media are ignoring the fact that the “Free Syrian Army” are killing Christians in Syria. Oppression in Communist nations is equally egregious. Westerman  also indicts the media:

• It is time for the U.S. mass media to acknowledge the persecution of Christians around the world, and to identify those who commit these crimes. We must recognize that the persecution of vulnerable Christian populations by militant Islamists and Communists is a herald of things to come for the remainder of humanity.

While the Western media are ready to uphold humanitarian causes, Christian martyrdom is not one of them. For one example, World magazine laments that:

• Google is hot for homosexual rights, but where’s the global campaign to support Christians, who are persecuted in dozens of countries? (August 11, 2012)

This is none! What Western nation is threatening these abusing countries for their flagrant violation of human rights? I am aware of none.

Meanwhile, the churches remain silent, convinced, for one reason or another, that they have to stare clear of politics. However, this position finds absolutely no support within the pages of Scripture. Instead, we are repeatedly warned to stand against oppression, especially the martyrdom of our brethren:

• Like a muddied spring or a polluted well is a righteous man who gives way to the wicked. (Proverbs 25:26)

When a Christian is silent or unresponsive, he “gives way to the wicked.” Instead, we are to expose wickedness:

• Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. (Ephes. 5:11).

Silence is not an option. If we don’t extend ourselves to the broken and the dying, it is sin:

• Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins. (James 4:17)

We cannot turn our backs. While many pastors insist that by taking a “political” stance, we turn people away from hearing the Gospel, Scripture would argue the opposite thing. Jesus prayed that His disciples would love one another so that the world would know that they belong to the Messiah – the Savior:

• "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:34-35)

• "My prayer is…that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me…May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:19-24)

How can the world see our mutual love, if we turn away from the oppression of our brethren? However, if they see us pouring ourselves out for our brethren  – whether they are in Africa, the Middle East or Asia – they will marvel at our love and self-sacrifice and wonder at the God who motivates such self-sacrifice.

Genocide and our Lame Response

Villagers of the Nuba Mountains of Sudan are being slaughtered and the world is looking elsewhere:

• The situation in the Nuba Mountains is reminiscent of the catastrophe in Darfur, where the Sudanese government executed an ethnic cleansing campaign against opposition forces and civilians during a conflict that began ion 2003…The region is also home to many Christians – an open target for an Islamic government in the north that persecuted and killed Christians in South Sudan for decades. That campaign has ensnared hundreds of thousands of civilians in pockets of the Nuba Mountains, forcing them to endure bombings, burned villages, rape, torture and starvation. It’s not the first time: During a similar campaign in the Nuba Mountains in the 1990’s, as many as half million residents died. (World Magazine, May 5, 2012, 36)

• Overall, the UN estimates that violence or hunger has displaced or severely affected some 350,000 residents in Blue Nile and South Kordofan [regions] since last year. As many as 150,000 live in refugee camps in South Sudan and neighboring Ethiopia. (37)

• [It] is a certain catastrophe that threatens worse casualties if the Sudanese government doesn’t relent or allow humanitarian aid to flow to the region. In mid-April Sudanese officials claimed that South Kordofan doesn’t need food aid, but USAID estimated 200,000 to 250,000 residents are close to running out of food. (37-38)

The media has only briefly covered this ongoing outrage, and that was when George Clooney got involved. Meanwhile, when similar outrages are carried out against Islamic people, the Western media is there and will not let up until Western nations intervene in some capacity. In Libya and Somalia, the Muslim leaders weren’t engaging in genocide against their own people, yet the West intervened. In Egypt, the West was instrumental in forcing the resignation of Mubarak, but he hadn’t committed genocide. Meanwhile, it had seemed likely that in both cases, an equally malevolent Islamic Brotherhood would seize control. The West is now talking about intervening in Syria in favor of the Al Qaeda supported insurgents – hardly innocent victims.

However, there isn’t a word spoken in favor of the innocent, non-insurgent Christians in Sudan and South Sudan. Why not?

I think that part of it can be understood from the perspective of Western antipathy for its Western roots, and many of these roots are a product of Christianity. Similarly, I think that we Christians are walking reminders of God’s righteous condemnation of sin, as Paul suggested:

• For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. (2 Cor. 2:15-16)

For those who are banking on the adequacy of their own righteousness, we represent the stench of death of their own impending judgment (Romans 1:32). It is therefore understandable that no one would want to be reminded of such a thing and might even be comfortable about the disappearance of this reminder.

However, I think that some of the blame should also fall on us Christians. When I mention persecution – whether the non-life-threatening Western form or outright genocide-form - to other Christians, I’m often confronted with what sounds like a dismissal: “Well, the Bible tells us that that we are going to suffer persecution.”

Although this is true, it certainly doesn’t mean that we are without responsibility in this matter:

• Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27).

It might be inevitable that there will always be the poor, “orphans and widows,” but this fact doesn’t alleviate us of our God-mandated responsibilities. Likewise, it might have been fated that the victim on the road to Jericho would be left-for-dead by his robbers, but Jesus made it very obvious that we are responsible to treat all as “neighbors,” whether the persecution is fated or not.

Perhaps, more subtly, educated Christians have been inculcated with a university-bred strain of moral-universalism – that we should be equally concerned about the Eskimo as we should about our cousin who lives next-door.

Although Christian concern regards all as “neighbors,” the Bible does teach that we have an overriding responsibility for our wives, children and parents, and even for those of our spiritual family (Gal. 6:10).

I even feel uncomfortable as I write this. Many Christians will regard this as a form of chauvinism – “it’s all about me and my group” - and therefore experience discomfort in raising their cries against the persecution of Christians.

We see the chauvinism of the whites, the blacks, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Jews, and even the Americans, and we attempt to distance ourselves.

However, Christian “chauvinism” is different. Jesus had prayed:

• "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me…May they be brought to complete unity [of love] to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

According to Jesus, one way to love others is be unified in love. In this way, they will see the reality of the Cross and be drawn. What greater blessing is there?