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"If they
have persecuted me, they will also persecute you."
So Christ told his disciples, and so it has again
come to pass.
Not since Stalin's time have Christians been so
savagely persecuted. But it is no longer communists
who are the great persecutors, but Islamist mobs
from Africa to the Balkans to Indonesia.
Last Sunday during evening services, terrorists
detonated car bombs outside five Catholic churches
in Mosul and Baghdad. A dozen worshipers perished.
Scores of women and children were injured.
Now the Christians are fleeing. In Damascus, Rita
Zekert, who heads the Caritas Migrant Center, says
that where, a year ago, the refugees were Shiite,
Sunni, Christian and Kurd in rough proportion to
each's share of the population, "nowadays, 95
percent of the people coming to us are Iraqi
Christians."
According to the New York Times, these refugees
"tell of Christian shopkeepers killed by Islamist
gangs for daring to sell alcohol, of family
businesses sold to ransom stolen children ... They
left Iraq, they say, only because they were too
terrorized to stay."
"All Sunday's attacks were against Catholics rather
than Eastern Orthodox churches, suggesting that
Christians who owed their allegiance to Rome had
become targets in the anti-Western campaign,
Catholic clerics said," says the Financial Times,
adding, "Iraq's 650,000-strong Christian community
is depleting fast. Most of the 3 million Christians
of Iraqi origin now live abroad, mainly in the U.S.
and Western Europe. Tens of thousands have moved to
Syria and Jordan, many crammed into tenement blocks,
living on charity, banned from work and waiting for
visas out of the Arab world."
From Lebanon, scores of thousands of Catholics have
fled in recent decades, leaving those behind as a
shrinking minority in a Muslim land where they once
flourished and, indeed, led.
Last May, in Nigeria's second city, Kano, Muslim
youth went on a midnight rampage with cutlasses,
clubs and machetes, massacring 600 Christians and
leaving their bodies in the streets. Sixteen
churches burned to the ground. The senior Muslim
cleric in the city ordered all Christians out. Some
30,000 were driven from their homes.
In Kosovo in March, Albanian mobs, enraged over
false rumors that Serbs were responsible for the
drowning of three Muslim boys, looted and torched 17
monasteries, churches and convents. To protect these
same Kosovar Albanians, the United States launched a
78-day bombing campaign on Belgrade and Serbia in
1999.
All the world is today focused on Darfur in the
western Sudan. Forgotten are the millions of
Christians in the southern Sudan who suffered
torture, slavery, mutilations, rapes, starvation,
massacres and exile at the hands of Sudanese
soldiers after Khartoum declared Islamic law for the
nation.
Between 1974, when Indonesia invaded East Timor, and
1999, when East Timor voted for independence, the
United Nations has documented at least 120
massacres, with many involving hundreds of dead in
this small Catholic country. After independence,
Indonesian troops slaughtered over 1,000 East
Timorese in rage over their decision to break free
of Jakarta.
In Egypt, the 6 million Christian Copts have begun
openly to protest persecution by Muslim fanatics and
local authorities. If, as President Bush has assured
us, "Islam is a religion of peace," what is going
on? Why the persecutions? Why the rampages and
massacres to force peaceful Christians to flee their
homes in Nigeria, Sudan, Kosovo, Iraq, Egypt,
Indonesia?
Answer: What is going on in the Islamic world is
something akin to what happened in Europe from the
Spanish Reconquista in 1492 through the Thirty Years
War. As Isabella was determined to expel the Moors
and de-Islamicize all of Spain, militant Muslims are
today determined to expel all Christians and to
de-Christianize the Islamic world.
They intend not only to drive Americans out of Iraq,
Saudi Arabia and other Arab lands, but to drive the
Christian minorities out – as aliens, traitors and
collaborators of the West. Islamic terrorists are
engaged in what has been called Fourth Generation
warfare, warfare by non-state actors, warfare that
will not be defeated with Tomahawk missiles and
F-16s. And the militant Islamists conducting this
form of warfare against Christian minorities in
their midst are only confirmed in the justice of
their jihad by America's imperial presence in Iraq
and our domination of the Middle East and Arab
world.
The Western empires came and conquered the Islamic
world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They
then departed or were driven out in wars of national
liberation. But the Christian minorities who had
lived peacefully there for 20 centuries, and who
were left behind when the West went home, are now
paying the price of our occupations and of militant
Islam's determination to purge and purify the Dar al
Islam of all the hated residue of the Christian
West.
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