Tag: militant Islam

The New Martyrdom: Christians in Peril

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What do these nations below have in common?  Quick answer:  they all persecute Christians.  What’s more, thirty-seven of them are Muslim nations:

  1. North Korea
  2. Somalia
  3. Syria
  4. Iraq
  5. Afghanistan
  6. Saudi Arabia
  7. Maldives
  8. Pakistan
  9. Iran
  10. Yemen
  11. Sudan
  12. Eritrea
  13. Libya
  14. Nigeria
  15. Uzbekistan
  16. Central African Republic
  17. Ethiopia
  18. Vietnam
  19. Qatar
  20. Turkmenistan
  21. Laos
  22. Egypt
  23. Myanmar
  24. Brunei
  25. Columbia
  26. Jordan
  27. Oman
  28. India
  29. Sri Lanka
  30. Tunisia
  31. Bhutan
  32. Algeria
  33. Mali
  34. Palestine
  35. United Arab Emirates
  36. Mauritania
  37. China
  38. Kuwait
  39. Kazakhstan
  40. Malaysia
  41. Bahrain
  42. Comoros
  43. Kenya
  44. Morocco
  45. Tajikistan
  46. Djibouti
  47. Indonesia
  48. Bangladesh
  49. Tanzania
  50. Niger

This shouldn’t come as any surprise.  As the Skeptical Inquirer reports, Islam currently poses the world’s greatest threat to human freedom, or to think for oneself.

You’ll note that this is a gradated list, with the worst offenders coming first, among them North Korea, a non-Muslim Stalinist holdout that persecutes Christians vigorously.  Estimates have it that between 50,000 to 70,000 Christians languish in prison camps, with few survivors likely, given the brutal conditions.  An unconfirmed report, says that  80 Christians were executed in November, 2013.  Change the regime, however, and the persecution will cease, as happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Ironically, today’s Russia is the one nation that has vigorously denounced the persecuting of Christians.

Not so for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan–all former Muslim constituents of the Soviet Union–where persecution of Christians continues.

You’ll see that the list also features some U. S. allies like Saudi Arabia and even Kuwait, a Muslim nation we saved from Saddam’s incursion.

And, of course, we all know about Pakistan with its endless duplicity, a nation outraged by our killing of Osama bin Laden who had taken refuge there and a free haven for the Taliban.  Persecuting Christians is almost a sport in Pakistan, with Christians often accused falsely of violating blasphemy laws by those seeking their property.

But Kenya, a nation with a predominantly Christian population, is also on the list.  This is because Kenya also has a minority Somalian population.  Bombings are frequent as in the recent terrorist insurgency from Somalia itself, resulting in the Nairobi mall massacre in which Christians were deliberately targeted and Muslim hostages let go.

Meanwhile in Egypt, several hundred Coptic churches have been ransacked and many of them burned by deposed President Morsi supporters from the Muslim Brotherhood.

As in Kenya, a nation needn’t have a Muslim majority for Christians to be singled out.  Take, for example, the Central African Republic, which has been in the recent headlines.  Following a recent seizure of power by a Muslim in a county overwhelmingly Christian, the Muslim minority immediately began to kill Christians.  Here, Christians formed their own militias to wade off the attacks, successfully driving the usurpers from power.

Some of the worst scenarios for Christians are playing out in war-ravaged Syria, whose Christian community dates back to the first century and St. Paul, who was converted on his way to Damascus.   In 2013, 2,123 Christians died, representing a 100% increase over the previous year.  Assad, by the way, didn’t persecute Christians.  In some Christian towns, insurgents have given Christians the option of converting or being executed on the spot.  Priests have been killed; nuns taken hostage.

It’s conceivable that soon there will be no Christians left in the Middle East.  Consider Iraq:  Before our incursion in 2003, there were some 2 million Christians in Iraq.  Only about half now remain.  According to the UN Committee for Refugees, 850,000  Christians  have left at last count.  There may even be as few as 250,000 remaining.

Before the rise of Islam in the 7th century, the Levant and North Africa were actually largely populated by Christians.   St. Augustine, in fact, was a North African bishop. Then came the Arab invasions, spreading “the religion of peace” by the sword.  The truth is that Islam hasn’t changed very much across the centuries, in doctrine or behavior.  Unlike Christianity, it’s rooted in a fundamentalism that has stubbornly resisted reform.  It’s as though time stood still.  It’s questionable whether Islam can ever reconcile with the tenets of democracy, for what Islam fears most is divergent opinion.

But I also want to be fair.  I studied in France a number of years ago and came into contact  with a good many Muslims.  My politics, not my religion, was what mattered.  In fact, not once did faith enter into our conversations.  Additionally, I frankly sympathize with the Palestinians in their quest for nationhood and a return to 1967 borders.  I haven’t any quarrel with secular Muslims, whom militants place in the same company as Western “infidels.” I cherish the several friendships I developed that transcended religion and homeland, whether Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, or Iran.

Unfortunately, where persecution of Christianity does exist, it often generates from a perception of the West as anti-Muslim.  We give billions to Israel annually, much of it employed to buttress Israel’s military might.  Think, for a moment, how you would feel were your people strafed and bombed by Israeli pilots flying American fighter jets, or your lands appropriated by Israeli settlers feverishly supported by many American evangelicals.  We don’t have a good footprint when it comes to the Middle East.  I would even argue that our disregard for the Islamic culture and faith has made groups like al Quaeda possible, feeding on aeons of resentment.  Unfortunately, Christians are caught in the exchange.

Religion, like politics, can prove violent in absolutes giving no ground.  I despise the lingering animosities of every political and religious faction.  True progressives move past ideology to an embrace of the human family.  I also distain religionists who fashion deity into a human assemblage, or composite of ourselves, incumbent with our prejudices and capacity for malevolence.

I likewise dislike the silence of governments with regard to the assault on Christians in their pursuit of  the political game of expediency.  I find this as unsavory as militant Islam’s historical penchant to impose religious and socio-political hegemony.

I yearn for the day that moderate Muslims disavow the sword; that Israelis cease their apartheid; that the U. S. commits itself to genuine justice for those long denied.  I think of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:  “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

But do I wake or sleep?

–rj

Two sides of a coin: conservative politics and militant Islam

I think all of us would like to take our yesterdays back, correct our missteps and, with the lucidity afforded by hindsight, retake the high ground.  In fact, our nostalgia for what’s past defines the tragedy of our present, manifesting itself in the emergence in the last 50-years of two primary forces, political and religious, warring on the present in the guise of conservatism.

Ironically, their genesis began at about the same time, with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran (1979) and the political ascendancy of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and America’s Ronald Reagan.  Most revolutions soften, or give way to human inertia, or to inherent entropy that characterizes Natural Law as with the collapse of the Soviet hegemony and the transition of Mao’s China into a market economy.

In America, the vestiges of the past are prominent in the rise of Tea Party and neo-conservative Republicans advocating reduced government in a slashing of taxes, sealing our borders, deregulating the market place, and a bent toward imperialism in foreign policy.  It too has a religious scent in its hostility to gays, embrace of creationism in the classroom, and strident opposition to abortion and death with dignity legislation.  While it has no Sharia law it can impose, it finds its corollary in pursuing legislative edict.  It hasn’t any qualms about imposing its views on others.

Thankfully, in most places, it can’t muster a majority, although evangelicals and catholics turned out in record numbers to oppose Obama (78% and 67% respectively) in last November’s election.  Unfortunately, this faction has seized the reins of the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, driving its agenda, making it easy to forget that it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who founded the Occupational Safety  & Health Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration.  It’s conceivable that even Reagan couldn’t muster the Republican nomination were he running today.

As for conservative religion, militant Islam has replaced communism as the new global threat, with tension and violence often in play, not only in the Middle East, but universally:  Africa (Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia); Asia (Sri Lanka, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, India).  Terrorism has been its weapon of choice, with bombings and assassinations even in Britain, France and the Netherlands.

As for my own America, I had placed my bet on our legacy of assimilation to keep us safe from the tribalism of places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq where it isn’t sufficient to make Jihad against the Infidel, but Sunni and Shiite must slaughter one another.  I have been wrong, as scarcely a day passes that I don’t hear of immigrant Muslim youth conspiring violence here at home.  While their numbers are few, their threat is palpable, as witness the Boston’s Patriot’s Day bombings and the Ft. Hood massacre by a member of our own armed forces.

But I’m also aware of media hype and its distorting perspective and its conflict with my own experience.  I studied in France in 1985.  My dearest friends, all of them, we’re Muslim.  They came from Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Palestine.  They rejoiced in finding a rare American supporting the right of Palestinians to a homeland.  “C’est historique,” one of them delightfully said.

Not once did the subject of religion intrude.  Humanity and justice were our priorities, melting away creed and origin.  I have memories here at home of Muslim immigrants in my classes.  Again, the same: an abounding rapport and absence of religion’s strictures.

In short, Muslims, the vast majority, abhor the violence of a fundamentalist segment that does injury to Islam, “the religion of peace.”  Let me offer the following:

As American Muslims and scholars of Islam, we wish to restate our conviction that peace and justice constitute the basic principles of the Muslim faith.  We wish again to state unequivocally that neither the al-Qaeda organization nor Usama bin Laden represents Islam or reflects Muslim beliefs and practice. Rather, groups like al-Qaeda have misused and abused Islam in order to fit their own radical and indeed anti-Islamic agenda.  Usama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s actions are criminal, misguided and counter to the true teachings of Islam (Statement Rejecting Terrorism, 57 leaders of North American Islamic organizations, September 9, 2002),

The truth is that conservative politics and religion are forces latent with danger when employing divisive appeals to self-interest rather than the collective good or utilizing scape-goating, straw-men methodologies designed to manipulate and secure power.  Such modalities, on the increase, mark a return to the volatile past with its animosities fostered by fear.

Politics should be about human community and addressing its needs; religion, about abandoning the barriers of distrust for the balm of love.

The earmarks of an unhealthy conservatism, whether political or religious, is one of parochial or ethnocentric interest, fueled by distrust and unthinking servility to the past, adumbrated by insecurity posed by change.

Sometimes I want to throw my arms up in despair.  I muse on how better a world devoid of the heat of political and religious passions; but as a devotee of the Enlightenment with its predication on Reason as the future’s arbitrator of a better world, I retain faith we can do better to reduce the disparity between entrenched custom and social amelioration.

I also know that the way of progress is sometimes in feet, not miles, and that injustices like slavery weren’t conquered quickly.  I believe there exists a resident Good in most people that will ultimately prevail.

In the interval, conserving those best values of the past while embracing the promise of the future’s kinder, more tolerant dispensation to humanity, is the proper synthesis for abounding peace and good will.

–rj