After yet another bloody weekend, it’s time to speak frankly about who’s killing Christians and why
Wealthy
Kenyans and Westerners bustled about Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi
on Saturday. Families ate lunch in the food court. A radio station
targeting Kenyan Asians was hosting a children’s event on the roof of
the parking lot.
Around noon, armed gunmen stormed the
mall and exploded grenades. Thousands of terrified people dropped to the
floor, fled out of exits and hid in stores. The gunmen began lining
people up and shooting some of the five dozen people they would
slaughter and 240 people, ages 2 to 78, that they would wound.
Al-Shabaab,
which is claiming credit for the attack, is reported to have singled
out non-Muslims. “A witness to the attacks at Nairobi’s upscale mall
says that gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave and that non-Muslims
would be targeted,” according to the Associated Press.
To weed
out the infidels, according to news reports, the terrorists asked people
for the name of Muhammad’s mother or to recite a verse from the Quran.
And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist attack of the weekend.
The Washington Post
reported that one British mother and her young children survived when
captors who shot her allowed her to leave on the condition she
immediately convert to Islam. The siege of the mall, which included the
taking of hostages, lasted four days. Three floors of the mall collapsed
and bodies were buried in the rubble.
And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist attack of the weekend.
The next day, two suicide bombs went off as Christians were leaving Sunday services at All Saints Anglican Church in Peshawar, Pakistan.
“There
were blasts and there was hell for all of us,” Nazir John, who was at
the church with at least 400 other worshipers, told the Associated
Press. “When I got my senses back, I found nothing but smoke, dust,
blood and screaming people. I saw severed body parts and blood all
around.”
Some 85 Christians were slaughtered and 120
injured, the bloodiest attack on Christians in Pakistan in history. The
hospital ran out of beds for the injured and there weren’t enough
caskets for the dead.
“I found nothing but smoke, dust, blood and screaming people. I saw severed body parts and blood all around.”
The
situation for Christians in Egypt has also gone from bad to worse.
August saw the worst anti-Christian violence in seven centuries. Sam
Tadros, a Coptic Christian and author of Motherland Lost,
says that there has been nothing like this year’s Muslim Brotherhood
anti-Christian pogrom since 1321, when a similar wave of church burnings
and persecution caused the decline of the Christian community in Egypt
from nearly half of Egypt’s population to its current ten percent.
The
violence of just three days in mid-August was staggering. Thirty-eight
churches were destroyed, 23 vandalized; 58 homes were burned and looted
and 85 shops, 16 pharmacies and 3 hotels were demolished. It was so bad
that the Coptic Pope was in hiding, many Sunday services were canceled,
and Christians stayed indoors, fearing for their lives. Six Christians
were killed in the violence. Seven were kidnapped.
Maalula,
Syria, is an ancient Christian town that has been so sheltered for
2,000 years that it’s one of only three villages where people still
speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Until September 7, when Islamist
rebels attacked as part of the civil war ripping through the country.
An
eyewitness to the murder of three Christians in Maalula—Mikhael Taalab,
his cousin Antoun Taalab, and his grandson Sarkis el Zakhm—reported
that the Islamists warned everyone present to convert to Islam. Sarkis
answered clearly, Vatican news agency Fides reported: “I am a Christian and if you want to kill me because I am a Christian, do it.”
Sister
Carmel, one of the Christians in Damascus who assist Maalula’s many
displaced Christians, told Fides, “What Sarkis did is true martyrdom, a
death in odium fidei.”
In recent weeks, we have Muslims killing Christians in Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan and Syria. Again.
It’s time to ask an important question that many of us have successfully avoided for far too long:
Can we finally start talking about the global persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims?
Finally? Please?
A case study in reaction
As Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert and Nina Shea write in Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians, “Christians are the single most widely persecuted religious group in the world today. This is confirmed in studies by sources as diverse as the Vatican, Open Doors, the Pew Research Center, Commentary, Newsweek and the Economist. According to one estimate, by the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, 75 percent of acts of religious intolerance are directed against Christians.”
How well does the media tell that story? And how did they cover this weekend’s events? As Anglicans
and other Christians worldwide grieved the brutal attack in Pakistan,
the media… did not. The worst attack on Pakistani Christians in history
didn’t make the front page of the New York Times. The Washington Post
buried the story on page A7 of Monday’s paper. On the front page of the
BBC web site, a small headline “Pakistan church blast kills dozens” was
below stories on Angela Merkel and the Emmys. By the next day, the
story was nowhere to be found.
British blogger Archbishop Cranmer noted,
“Without media coverage we in the West cannot smell the fear of those
Christians who are persecuted by Muslims all over the world.”
“Without
media coverage we in the West cannot smell the fear of those Christians
who are persecuted by Muslims all over the world.”
Even when
the media do cover violence against Christians, the religion angle tends
to be buried or given short shrift. Part of this is because
politicians, who are the primary sources for many of these news stories,
don’t have a strong incentive to confront the reality of Muslim
violence against non-Muslims (or, to be honest, many other complicated
problems). Imran Khan, whose party leads the government in Peshawar,
suggested that the church bombing attack wasn’t about religion but,
rather, an effort to scuttle peace talks. He also blamed U.S. drone
strikes for provoking militants. That’s all all well and good, but
violence against Christians goes back even before 2001, when Predator
drones armed with Hellfire missiles began to be used in Pakistan to
assassinate terrorist leaders and their companions. By about 1300 years.
The Christian Science Monitor asked the promising question, “Why did militants attack Pakistani Christians?”
and discovered that, well, it was really just a case of militants of
unspecified religion looking for a “controversial” target and “more
spectacular, attention-grabbing attacks.” Why the church? Certainly not
because of any particular animosity towards Christians—it was just that
the Christians were “vulnerable.”
Trying to explain the attack in Kenya, Think Progress published an interesting piece headlined “What The Deadly Attack On A Kenya Mall Was Really About.”
It talks about the weakness of al Shabaab and the terror group’s
efforts to provoke conflict in Kenya. The words Muslim and Islam do not
appear in the article. Another article is headlined “Five Things The Kenya Mall Attack Tells Us About Global Terrorism.” Spoiler alert: The Kenya mall attack doesn’t tell us anything about religious violence.
And
what about Egypt? Well, as the persecution of Christians has heated up,
the press tends to portray the violence against Christians as
“sectarian skirmishes” or “clashes” between religious groups. This is
about as accurate as describing the Armenian genocide as “clashes”
between Turks and Armenians.
“Islam is peace.”
Right after the worst terrorist attack on American soil on September 11, 2001, American leaders from George W. Bush on down rushed to portray Islam as peaceful. While it’s simplistic to characterize any religion or other belief system as being strictly about “violence” or “peace,” the Bush Administration had a compelling political interest in marginalizing Islamist terrorists and assuring Muslims throughout the world that American reprisals weren’t going to be indiscriminately applied to all practitioners of the religion.
Sure, the terrorists
clearly and explicitly claimed they were fighting for Islam. But if
Americans responded in agreement, the duty of Muslims to fight for their
religion could have quickly led to a global conflagration.
Politicians claiming Islam is nothing more than a peaceful religion usually aren’t exegetical experts.
On September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush stopped by the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and said,
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what
Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent
peace. They represent evil and war.”
Twelve years ago
in the heat of the moment, this may have made sense, however ill-advised
it is for politicians to be taken seriously as theologians (even those
who claim Jesus as their favorite political philosopher).
But politicians are still doing it. After two Islamist terrorists
beheaded a British soldier in the street in front of an elementary
school, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg quoted from the Quran and
assured everyone that Islam had been “perverted” by soldier Lee Rigby’s
murderers, who claimed they were beheading the soldier in the name of
Islam.
“Terrorism has no religion because there is no
religious conviction that can justify the kind of arbitrary, savage
random violence that we saw on the streets of Woolwich,” said Clegg.
That’s
very similar to what Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in his
statement this weekend: “The terrorists have no religion and targeting
innocent people is against the teachings of Islam and all religions.”
Well
it’s all settled then! If we could just somehow convey to the Islamist
terrorists that they, in fact, have no relationship whatsoever to Islam,
we could all just get back to the business of watching Emmys.
One
problem with this approach, and I’m not even talking about the 1300
years of history that speaks to the use of violence in pursuit of the
spread of Islam, is that the politicians claiming Islam is nothing more
than a peaceful religion usually aren’t exegetical experts.
For
example, Clegg cited chapter 5, verse 32 of the Quran as “If anyone
kills a human being it shall be as though he killed all mankind whereas
if anyone saves a life it shall be as though he saved the whole of
mankind.”
This is a favorite verse of politicians.
(It’s also been used by Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama.) The
only problem with using this verse is that people always fail to quote
the entire verse, which in this case changes the meaning a bit. And even
worse, the verse is excerpted completely out of context. With the
caveat that any time you put 12 Muslims, Mormons or Methodists in a
room, you might get 12 different explanations for what a verse means,
let’s just say that even a reading of the following verse suggests that
we’re not exactly in the peaceful section of the Quran:
Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.
One
could understand that some Muslims might interpret this in a manner
differently than Deputy Prime Minister Clegg. To constantly harp on the
fact that most Muslims are not violent obscures the reality that, well, a
good number are.
Is 47 million al Qaeda sympathizers a low number, really?
It’s like those Pew polls that come out every two years showing that most Muslims do not, in fact, support al Qaeda. Last year’s release began:A year after the death of its leader, al Qaeda is widely unpopular among Muslim publics. A new poll by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, conducted March 19 to April 13, 2012, finds majorities – and mostly large majorities – expressing negative views of the terrorist group in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and Lebanon.
The media went along with the press release. The Los Angeles Times headline was “Muslims in Middle East, Asia think poorly of Al Qaeda, poll finds.” U.S. News & World Report went with “After bin Laden’s Death, al Qaeda’s Popularity Wanes.” CNN’s story was “Poll: Many Muslims in Mideast, Pakistan have poor view of al Qaeda,” which included this paragraph:
In Pakistan, where U.S. Navy SEALs killed the al Qaeda leader during a raid on a compound a year ago, 55% of the Muslims surveyed had a negative opinion of the terrorist group, according to the poll. Only 13% had a favorable view.
It’s wonderful and
important news that the percentage of Muslims in five countries who
don’t like al Qaeda is as low as it is. But I think we forgot to notice
that it’s still alarmingly high!
Yes, “only” 21 percent
of Egyptian Muslims, 15 percent of Jordanian Muslims, 13 percent of
Pakistani Muslims, 6 percent of Turkish Muslims and 2 percent of
Lebanese Muslims express favorable views toward one particular terrorist
group.
But when you think about how those percentages
represent 47,284,049 Muslims in only five of the 50 countries in which a
majority of the population is Muslim, it becomes a bit more alarming.
The poll doesn’t mention support for al Qaeda-linked terrorists in, for
example, Indonesia, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.
Saturday people, Sunday people
We’re talking about Christian persecution by Muslims because of a particularly macabre issue: Jews have already largely been driven out of many Muslim countries.
Lela Gilbert, a journalist who writes about Jewish and Christian persecution, tells of encountering jihadi graffiti
in Jerusalem that read “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.” She
didn’t get the meaning at first. A friend explained that it referred to
Jews worshiping on Saturday and Christians on Sunday and, more subtly,
about the order that non-Muslims would be targeted.
Gilbert
notes that in 1948 there were about 135,000 Jews in Iraq. Now there are
fewer than a dozen. In 2003, Iraq had a fairly strong Christian
population. Since 2003, more than half of the 800,000 Christians have
fled church bombings, rapes, torture, kidnapping, beheading and house
eviction.
Or take Egypt. In 1947 there were about
100,000 Jews there. Today there are less than 50, Gilbert says. And
Egypt’s Copts — numbering about 8 million — are experiencing the worst
anti-Christian pogrom in 700 years. The 30,000 Jews in 1948 Syria are
down to less than a dozen. It’s the Christians’ turn.
Preparation before the conversation
Before we can have an actual conversation about the persecution of Christians and others at the hands of Muslims, we have to lay some groundwork. Here are some quick thoughts for journalists, politicians and the Christian Church.
Journalists: Many journalists
act as if they can’t report that acts of violence appear to have some
kind of Muslim faith behind them because it might inflame anti-Muslim
feelings. This reportorial approach is paired with an odd desire to hype
any act of “violence” by Christians. This is why the American media
will highlight a tiny Florida church burning some Quran while not
mentioning that, say, the entire Kingdom of Saudia Arabia confiscates
all Bibles at customs and destroys them.
When and where
violence occurs involving Muslims and Christians, as it did in
Pakistan, Kenya, Syria and Egypt, it is framed as a political conflict,
with no examination of the religious details. Not only is this
grievously unfair to the Christians who continue to be slaughtered while
the rest of the world is busy watching Dancing With The Stars,
it’s also a disservice to Islam, whose followers are not monolithic in
their persecution of non-Muslims. Many Muslims themselves are persecuted
in the name of Muslim violence. To take the most recent example, at
least 96 people in Iraq were killed this past weekend when a string of
bombs detonated in short order, targeting Shiite funeral-goers. Muslims
who defend Christians are a bold lot. Salman Taseer, the Punjab
governor, was a vocal opponent of anti-blasphemy laws that target
Christians and other religious minorities. For this, he was assassinated
in 2011 by his security guard.
It’s not journalists’
job to protect the public from these facts. And if it were, it would be
impossible. While the media may think they’ve done a good job of
obscuring part of this reality, most people have figured out that a lot
of Muslims do support violence as a part of the way of Islam. And
they’ve figured out as well that a lot of Muslims don’t. Both groups can
appeal to long traditions within Islam for their defense.
It is
the job of journalists to convey information about local and world
events in all their complexity and nuance. While most media outlets
privilege politics over other cultural factors, journalists really need
to be cognizant about how ignorance of the role of religion harms news
gathering. They should make sure their sources aren’t just politicians.
They should make sure their understanding of religion is respectful of
the importance it plays in most people’s lives.
Politicians:
Politicians need to stop giving speeches that claim to know the heart
of Muslims or the true meaning of Islam. It’s offensive and it’s not
helping. And if politicians are going to give scolding speeches about
religious beliefs, here’s a thought: Less of condemnation of “those who slander the prophet of Islam”
and more condemnation of “those who slaughter Pakistani Christians
coming out of worship.” Without even getting into whether there is a
foreign policy role to play in the persecution of Christians, the
American bully pulpit and diplomacy corps could stand to speak more
clearly about religious violence. The current model of apologizing for American freedoms is indefensible.
The Christian Church:
Whether journalists stop downplaying the facts of the persecution of
Christians, Christians need to stay informed. Even if American
politicians respond to Islamist violence by apologizing for the freedom
of speech and of religion, the church must remain vigilant. And many
are. The media didn’t quite pick up on the significance of the event,
but Pope Benedict XVI announced the canonization of the Martyrs of
Otranto in the same consistory in which he announced his intention to
resign the papacy. In May, Pope Francis canonized the 800 Christians,
who were beheaded for their faith after Turkish Muslims invaded their
city in 1480. In his words, “They had refused to renounce their faith
and died confessing the risen Christ.” Most church bodies have prayer
guides to help members pray for the persecuted church. And many
religious human rights groups work hard to get word out about
persecution worldwide. Christians and others interested in stopping
religious persecution should ask media outlets to cover news such as the
forced conversions, blasphemy persecutions and bombings of Christians.
However
much we may wish Muslim violence against Christians would resolve
itself or go away, being in denial serves no purpose. To combat the
persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, we must first
acknowledge its existence. And we need to be clear about exactly who is
perpetrating violence against Christians and what is motivating them.
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