What caused the Washington Post to reject his submission? The nonagenarian Eliot had written frankly about the roots of Islamic violence in Islamic theology: Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Islam, to the contrary, is essentially hostile to “the infidels” . . . Jesus was anti-violent, Muhammad was violent . . . Muslims become violent, or threaten violence, when they feel offended: when we Christians feel offended, almost never do we become violent, and almost always we suffer the disrespect in silence.23
Eliot’s observations are borne out by Muslim and Christian scriptures, by history, and by current affairs. But they go against the one unwavering dogma to which the mainstream media clings—moral and cultural relativism. Hence the need to suppress them.
No doubt the editors of “On Faith” were expecting the usual boilerplate responses on the subject of Muslim attacks on Christians in the Muslim world: acknowledge their existence, yes, but be quick to revert to the usual narrative—that Muslim violence is anything but a byproduct of Islamic indoctrination. That is essentially how most other contributors responded: one found Christian fundamentalism as troubling as Muslim fundamentalism; another bemoaned how scriptures can incite violence, while being careful not to mention any particular religion or scripture; yet another counseled suffering Christians to “turn the other cheek” and forgive their persecutors, cloyingly adding that all violence “can be overcome with our radical love”—easy sentiments to preach while safe in distant America.24
In short, while the mainstream media may report a few facts from the most spectacular incidences of Christian persecution, they employ an arsenal of semantic games, key phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism to uphold a narrative first forged by virulently anti-Western academics in the 1960s and 1970s: that Muslim violence and intolerance are products of anything and everything—poverty, political and historical grievances, or territorial disputes—except Islam.
There is, of course, one reason why the mainstream media is reticent to report objectively on Christian persecution under Islam. Of all forms of Islamic violence, the abuse of Christians where Muslims are in power has the capacity to completely undermine the liberal narrative that has dominated politics for decades. Muslim violence in Europe or against Israel poses no challenge to that narrative: in both cases, Muslims are seen as the underdogs, who may be sympathized with no matter how much they lash out. They may be screaming and rioting, firing rockets, and destroying property—all while calling for the death and destruction of the “infidel” West or Israel’s Jews to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Still, this bloodlust can be portrayed as a natural byproduct of the frustration Muslims feel as an oppressed minority, “rightfully” angry with the “colonial” West and its Israeli proxy.
But if Muslims get a free pass when their violence is directed against those currently stronger than themselves, how does one reason away their violence when it is directed against those who are weaker than they are, those who have no political influence whatsoever—in this case, the millions of Christians suffering under Islam? The rationalizations used to minimize Muslim violence against the West and Israel simply cannot work here, for now Muslims are the majority—and they are the ones violent and oppressive to their minorities, in ways that make Western and Israeli treatment of Muslims seem enviable.
In other words, Christian persecution is perhaps the most obvious example of a phenomenon the mainstream media wants to ignore out of existence—Islamic supremacism. Vastly outnumbered and politically marginalized Christians in the Islamic world simply wish to worship in peace, and yet they still are hounded and attacked; their churches are burned and destroyed; their children are kidnapped, raped, and enslaved. These Christians are often identical to their Muslim co-citizens in race, ethnicity, national identity, culture, and language; there is generally no political or property dispute on which the violence can be blamed. The only problem is that they are Christian—they are the other—and so they must be subjugated, according to Sharia’s position for all others; for all infidels, including Israel and the West.
If the mainstream media were to report honestly on the persecution of Christians under Islam, the obvious implications that Islam is dangerously hostile to all non-Muslims would be inescapable. Hence, journalists develop an instinct—or make a deliberate choice—to ignore or minimize these uncomfortable facts. No wonder so many Americans, including most self-professed Christians, are either totally unaware of the phenomenon or have no idea of its extent or significance.
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: ENABLING THE PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS
The American public is largely at the mercy of the mainstream media when it comes to information about events in the Muslim world. But what does one make of the actions of the United States government, which has access to the best intelligence available? In both words and actions, the Obama administration has not only ignored Muslim persecution of Christians, but also actually enabled it.
While the plight of Christians under Islam has never been a burning issue for earlier U.S. administrations, there were some valid reasons for this. As we have seen, Christian persecution under Islam, though ancient, is also relatively “new” in the modern era—returning in earnest around the 1970s and progressively getting worse. It would obviously take Western governments some time to acknowledge and adjust to the new reality on the ground. And while today a number of humanitarian organizations report on the reality of Christian suffering in Muslim lands, such information was largely unavailable in earlier years, or at least much more difficult to access—even for the intelligence community. There was no Internet.
These excuses obviously do not apply to the current Obama administration. The situation of Christians in the Muslim world has become much worse, even as Western intelligence has become much better. But not only has the administration ignored the increasingly obvious plight of Christians under Islam, Obama’s wholesale support for the “Arab Spring” has thoroughly empowered those Muslim forces especially hostile to Christian minorities.
Consider the administration’s handling of recent events in Egypt. Although former president Hosni Mubarak was the United States’ central ally in the Middle East for thirty years, the Obama administration made it a point to throw him under the bus soon after protests began against him. Again, it was one thing for the mainstream media to portray the Arab Spring in glowing terms, but quite another thing entirely for the White House—which is privy to the best intelligence and area expertise—to go along lock, stock, and barrel with this narrative. After all, there was a reason why former U.S. administrations were supportive of autocrats like Mubarak: they knew that the alternative would be Islamists, who are as bad for U.S. interests as they are for religious minorities. This has been confirmed by recent events in Egypt, where many Egyptians—including a great many who had voted for Morsi—are rising up against him and his Islamist agenda, only to be brutally suppressed by the state, with validations by Islamic fatwas demonizing and permitting the slaying of those who resist Morsi.25
Next, the Obama administration supported a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Muhammad Morsi, now President of Egypt, while overlooking the Brotherhood’s decades-long history of working to impose Sharia on Egypt—not to mention their fatwa calling for Coptic churches’ destruction. Sayyid Qutb, the “godfather” of modern-day jihad, who highlighted the need to subjugate the non-Muslim world, was a Brotherhood leader. Senior Muslim Brotherhood officials still admit their goal is to resurrect the caliphate; they tend to say things on live TV such as, “Yes, one of these days, we [Muslim Brotherhood] will be masters of the world.”26 President Morsi himself, during the presidential elections, publicly recited the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto, “The Koran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path and death in the name of Allah is our goal”27—a motto that any “martyrdom-seeking” jihadi would be proud of. Despite all this, in February 2011, to justify the administration’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, Director of National Intelligence Ja
mes Clapper described the Muslim Brotherhood as “largely secular. ”28
The administration has even gone so far as to invite to the White House a member of the notorious al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya.29 This is an organization designated “terrorist” by the U.S. government, not least for its role in the aforementioned Luxor Massacre and its countless terror attacks on Egypt’s Copts stretching back to the 1970s. On the other hand, Christians from the Middle East are sometimes banned access to the White House. On November 22, 2011, the Beirut Arabic-language news agency al-Nashara reported that, at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dalia Mogahed canceled a planned meeting between Obama and the Christian Maronite patriarch of Lebanon.30 Mogahed, an observant Muslim who wears the hijab, was personally selected by Obama to serve as an advisor on, ironically, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.31
The Obama administration has even intervened militarily to help Islamist forces. The most obvious example is Libya. After U.S. forces helped Islamic rebels in Libya to assume power—or, in the words of an Examiner headline, “U.S. supports Al Qaeda ‘freedom fighters’ against Gaddafi in Libyan civil war”32—the thanks the U.S. received was an al-Qaeda attack on the American consulate in Benghazi and the murders of four American officials, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. To hide the fact that the al-Qaeda rebels whom the Obama administration empowered in Libya were behind this terrorist attack, the administration tried to frame the attack as a response to a You Tube movie about the prophet of Islam.
Yet the day before the attacks on U.S. missions (including the U.S. embassy in Cairo) began, I had, based on Arabic reports, exposed the fact that al-Qaeda-connected Islamists were threatening to attack American embassies unless the U.S. released the “Blind Sheikh” and other imprisoned jihadis.33 One Arabic report I cited appeared a full three days before the attacks began on September 11, 2012—a premeditated date chosen deliberately. But the mainstream media did not pick up on any of this; the attacks were portrayed as unexpected and impromptu, and all blame was attributed to Youtube moviemakers living in the United States. The Obama administration was only too happy to endorse this narrative, despite all the independent intelligence it had otherwise.
The true nature of Libya’s “liberation” is becoming ever clearer. Most recently, in late February 2013, reports appeared of Christians, including one man holding dual U.S. and Swedish citizenship, being arrested on proselytism charges. Then some one hundred Christian Copts from Egypt, most of them trying to work in Libya, were also arrested and tortured by the nation’s Sharia-supporters (“Ansar al-Sharia”) for possessing Bibles. Among other abuse, their heads were shaven and some who wore the Coptic wrist tattoo had it painfully removed with acid. One Christian man, Ezzat Hakim Atallah, died.
Interestingly, Obama had earlier justified U.S. military intervention in Libya primarily on humanitarian grounds. In his March 28, 2011, speech, he spoke of “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” adding that not assisting them “would have been a betrayal of who we are.” The administration has used this same humanitarian argument to support Syria’s rebels, a great many of whom, as we have already seen, are jihadis—including al-Qaeda members—decimating Syria’s Christian population.34
On the other hand, the Obama administration has exhibited no concern for “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings” in cases where Muslim regimes slaughter Christians. For example, after the Egyptian military massacred Christian Copts in Maspero, running them over with armored vehicles, the White House responded by saying, “Now is a time for restraint on all sides”—as if Egypt’s beleaguered and unarmed Christian minority needs to “restrain” itself against the nation’s military. 35
In short, the flipside of the Obama administration’s support for its Islamist allies has been a lack of U.S. support for the Islamists’ enemies, or, more properly, victims—chief among them, Christian minorities. For example, according to a June 7, 2012, CNS report,The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports. The new human rights reports—purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered—are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role. For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report—a full two years behind the times—or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011. [Emphasis added.]36
The CNS story goes on to quote several U.S. officials questioning the motives of the Obama administration. Former U.S. diplomat Thomas Farr said that he has “observed during the three-and-a-half years of the Obama administration that the issue of religious freedom has been distinctly downplayed.” Leonard Leo, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said, “to have pulled religious freedom out of it [the report] means that fewer people will obtain information,” so that “you don’t have the whole picture.”
Of course, this would not be the first time that the Obama administration has censored information related to Islam. In October 2011 the administration announced it was “pulling back all training materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have claimed are offensive.” In the words of U.S. Attorney Dwight C. Holton, “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. . . . They will not be tolerated. ”37
This move has crippled U.S. intelligence concerning Islamic threats. Moreover, it has led to some surreal moments, when the administration’s party line—that there is absolutely no connection between Islam and violence—bumps up against reality. For example, during a congressional hearing on extremism in December 2011, the Homeland Defense department’s Paul Stockton refused to associate Islamic terrorists with Islam in any way, shape, or form, regardless of “any set of qualifiers”; he would not even agree that al-Qaeda is following a “distorted” or “perverted” version of Islam. When Representative Dan Lungren repeatedly asked Stockton if he would at least concede that al-Qaeda “is acting out violent Islamist extremism,” Stockton continued to refuse, insisting that the group merely consists of “murderers,” as a visibly stunned Lungren and others looked on.38
A Newsmax article titled “Obama Overlooks Christian Persecution” gives more examples of State Department indifference “regarding the New Years’ murders of Coptic Christians in Egypt and the ravaging of a cathedral.” The State Department under Hillary Clinton “refused to list Egypt as ‘a country of particular concern,’ even as Christians and others were being murdered, churches destroyed, and girls kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam”—despite the fact that the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, an independent and bipartisan federal government commission, had recommended that the State Department do so.39
Indeed, in the State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, last released in September 2011, neither Egypt nor Pakistan was among the “Countries of Particular Concern”—defined by the State Department as countries that are the “worst violators of religious freedom”—even though the State Department’s own report “stated that Pakistani law calls for
the death penalty for people who commit ‘blasphemy’ against Islam or convert from Islam to another religion.” The report even actually “listed multiple instances of the Pakistani government using the law to persecute Christians”40—yet Pakistan still was not deemed a country of particular concern.
This is not surprising considering that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was personally responsible for classifying countries with the “of particular concern” label, believes all religions are equally prone to violence. As for Muslim violence, her biggest “worry” is that it sometimes targets other Muslims—not that it frequently targets non-Muslims:Religions against one another, it is even within religions, within Christianity, within Judaism within, oh, Islam, within Hinduism there are people who believe their version of that religion is the only right way to believe. And so in some of the countries that we are concerned about that are majority Muslim countries it’s the intimidation and violence against Muslims who are in minority sects that we most worry about. [Emphasis added.]41
Indeed, Muslim clerics regularly taunt Christian minorities with the indifference—at best—of America and the West. For example, Egyptian cleric Sheikh Wagdi Ghoneim recently posted an online video in which, after accusing Egypt’s Christian Copts of playing a major role in the December 2012 protests against Islamist President Morsi, he threatened them with genocide, sarcastically adding, “What do you think—that America will protect you? Let’s be very clear, America will not protect you. If so, it would have protected the Christians of Iraq when they were being butchered! ”42
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Page 27
