Jews and Christians Targeted in Muslim Lands
Thursday, February 1, 2007
By: Lela Gilbert

Jerusalem Post Christian Edition

  No one is more attuned to issues of religious freedom than Jews. In the mid-1990s a Jewish lawyer played a key role in bringing the persecution of Christians to the world’s attention. Michael Horowitz, a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, first learned of anti-Christian abuses from an Ethiopian believer who was employed in his home. As Horowitz took a closer look, he soon realized that persecution of Christians was, in fact, a global epidemic. Alarmed, Horowitz contacted scores of Evangelical Christian organizations, and he and Nina Shea, a Roman Catholic international human rights attorney, organized a conference and brought 100 top Christian leaders together for the first time to seriously address the issue of worldwide anti-Christian persecution.

Among several positive results of that conference were two best-selling books. One was In the Lion's Den: A Shocking Account of Persecuted and Martyrdom of Christians Today and How We Should Respond, authored by Nina Shea. The other book, which was awarded the Christian Bookseller’s Association’s Gold Medallion in 1997, was Their Blood Cries Out: The Untold Story of Persecution Against Christians in the Modern World, which I co-authored with Paul Marshall.

Today, more than a decade since that conference, members of the Jewish community continue to express concern not only about burgeoning global anti-Semitism, but also about the plight of Christians who face continuous abuse in Muslim lands where they, like Jews, are specifically targeted by terrorists. But as David Parsons, the ICEJ’s Media Director, recently remarked: “The question that Jews keep asking me is ‘Why aren't evangelical Christians doing more to protest the persecution of Christians?’”

Such concerns are well founded. Consider the following…

In Iraq: In October 2006, Father Boulos Iskander, 59, a Syrian Orthodox priest, was beheaded in a town near Mosul. His kidnappers had demanded $40,000 and that the priest’s church publicly repudiate Pope Benedict XVI’s recent remarks about Islam. In November, a bomb blast shattered the windows of a Catholic church in Mosul while Dominican priests were holding evening prayer. Tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iraq since the war began in 2003.

In Malaysia: In November 2006, angry Muslims protested outside Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Ipoh, Perak state, after word spread that the church would baptize a group of Malay Muslims who had converted to Christianity. Earlier in the year, a Malaysian female convert to Christianity was forced into hiding after Muslim radicals issued death threats against her and the lawyers representing her case. Islamic laws in Malaysia forbid conversion out of Islam (“apostasy”) and regard it as a criminal offense; “apostates” may be fined, detained and imprisoned.

In Turkey: In November 2006, six Molotov cocktails damaged a Protestant place of worship in western Turkey, breaking windows and scorching the exterior of the building. The attack followed months of repeated harassment of Christians in the town of Odemis, 65 miles east of Izmir. In a more recent incident, Asia News reported, “Two converts to Christianity, are facing trial on November 23, and could get six months to three years in prison.” Their crime?  “Insulting Turkishness.”

In Egypt:  “An Egyptian Christian teenager escaped her Muslim kidnappers in October 2006 hours after they had drugged her on a public bus. They threatened to rape her and convert her to Islam if her family did not leave their Nile Delta city of El-Mahala el-Kobra. Laurence Wagih Emil, 15, escaped the ground-floor room where she was being held in Cairo’s southern Helwan suburb at 10 p.m. while her captors were away breaking their Ramadan fast” (Compass Direct).  Egypt’s Coptic and Evangelical Christians face enormous social pressure, intimidation and threats of violence.

In Iran: “On 10 December 2006, Iranian secret police raided Christian fellowships in Karaj, Tehran, Rasht and Bandar-i Anzali, confiscating computers, literature and materials and arresting 15 believers they accused of evangelism and actions against the national security of Iran. All but one have since been released after forfeiting money, job permits and even house deeds as bail. Reportedly, new government directives will soon place the church even more under the thumb of the intelligence ministry and security forces.” (The World Evangelical Alliance 'Religious Liberty Prayer List' report)

In Ethiopia: Increasing anti-Christian violence was spearheaded by radical Muslims from Somalia, who declared jihad against Ethiopian Christians. World Magazine reported on October 10, 2006: “For weeks a group of about 300 men the locals described as ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ trained in a remote area near the town of Jima, 250 miles southwest of Addis Ababa. According to eyewitnesses, the group includes a number of Somalis. Government forces, alarmed by their activities, arrested several of the leaders. But the remainder organized and, armed with machetes and knives, attacked Christian churches and villages. Two months later, in a stunning turnaround, the Ethiopian Army not only drove the jihadists out of Ethiopia, but as The Guardian reported on December 27, 2006, “pushed to within 18 miles of the Islamist stronghold of Mogadishu today…” Despite the fact that the Ethiopians were responding to an invasion of their sovereign state, however, “international criticism of their incursion into Somalia mounted.”

In Nigeria: In July 2006, several sources reported that an unidentified woman was stoned and clubbed to death in Izom for “street evangelism”—she was observed speaking to some young men about Christianity and giving them tracts. She was under police investigation when rioters attacked the police station. The officers fled and abandoned her to the mob, which beat her to death. Anti-Christian violence in Nigeria (which is divided between Christians and Muslims) has continued unabated for several years. According to Open Doors International, in 2004 alone, Nigerian Christians endured 1,500 to 2,000 massacres by militant Islamists - 269 churches were burned to the ground and 60,000 to 65,000 people were displaced. In the states of Plateau and Bauchi alone, 1,300 to 1,500 widows and 8,000 fatherless or orphaned children have been created by the massacres.

And, of course, as has been often reported in these pages, the Christian population in the Palestinian territories continues to decline because of discrimination and persecution, particularly since the second intifada. According to Justus Weiner of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “Palestinian Christians have a higher rate of emigration compared to Palestinian Muslims and the Christian population of the West Bank and Gaza has plunged from about 20 percent after World War II to less than 1.7 percent now. Tens of thousands have abandoned their holy sites and ancestral properties to live abroad. Some senior Christian clerics claim that the dramatic rise in Christian emigration from PA-controlled territories is a result of the Israeli ‘occupation.’ However, in-depth research demonstrates that the precipitous decline in the Christian population is primarily a result of social, economic, and religious discrimination and persecution within Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Jews have good reason to be alert to abuses caused by religious persecution. According to Wikipedia, “In 1945 there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world. Today, there are fewer than 8,000. In some Arab states, such as Libya (which was once around 3 percent Jewish), the Jewish community no longer exists; in other Arab countries, only a few hundred Jews remain.”

Today it is Christians who are fleeing Muslim lands by the thousands as terrorism and other actions against them spin out of control. Their suffering persists despite the efforts of such groups as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has since 1998 reported to the President of the United States on matter of religious liberty and persecution. Meanwhile, The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church coordinates global efforts and reports on specific trouble spots, while Compass Direct [http://www.compassdirect.com/] carefully documents and reports incidents on anti-Christian persecution around the world.

Nina Shea and Paul Marshall continue their work, focusing attention on persecuted believers at The Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute. Of the threat to Christians in Muslim lands, in a January interview Marshall told me, “Radical Islam is growing in power throughout the world. Even historically moderate countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh are now troubled by militant and terrorist groups. The result is increasing oppression and persecution of non-Muslim minorities. By far the largest minority is Christians, who are now fleeing the Middle East in large numbers. This is true in Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. More would flee Iran if they could manage to get out of the country or to gain refugee and asylum status outside, which is very difficult. One problem faced by Christians is that for all too many observers, especially in the West, Christians are assumed to be white and European. In fact, the vast majority of Christians live in the Third World, and their primary persecutors are Muslim extremists.”