Anti-Christian Muslim hostilities are rooted in the divine texts of Islam and the practices of the early Muslims. Islam defined itself by its antagonism for all other religions; but especially reserves its hostility for Judaism and Christianity - the two major competitors Islam claims to "supersede".
Adversarial and triumphalist in attitude for all other religions, the Koran goes on to decree actual violence and the subjugation of non-believers. The natural progression from theory to practice has resulted in continual (external) violence against the "other" beyond the lands of Islam and (internal) oppression for the "other" in newly stolen Muslim lands.
The war against Christianity is being actively waged on both fronts. Christians in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt are culled by self-styled holy warriors enabled and endorsed by the larger Muslim population. The external war manifests itself in outright violence against Christian communities. Attacks are justified on the grounds that the Christians being attacked, often in the abode of Islam, have breached or are not under the covenant that grudgingly allows Christians (dhimma) to exist as barely accepted peoples.
The above nations, as well as most other Muslim states, however, are also waging the internal war against Christians in the form of persecution. Christians in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc have their rights curtailed below the level blacks experienced in the United States during the Jim Crow era. The internal war on Christians is actually the deadlier but quieter front in the war against Christianity. The internal war is based on the vestiges of Islamic law and is solely religious. Christian persecution is most acute in Islamic nations whose laws are more heavily reliant on Islamic law - such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Maldives. The latter two nations actually prohibit the practice of Christianity.
As Ali points out, Muslim advocacy groups are tacitly taking part in the war against Christians. These groups, such as CAIR, purportedly serve as civil rights movements but function as bulldogs for Islamic supremacism. They promote the victimhood narrative in the West that Muslims are persecuted and engage in silencing opposition and criticism to the internal war against Christians waged by their coreligionists with smears attacks.
Take note how wide spread and popular these smear attacks are with fascist minded Muslims beyond CAIR. "Memri special" anyone?
The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia....
The litany of suffering could be extended. In Iran dozens of Christians have been arrested and jailed for daring to worship outside of the officially sanctioned church system. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, deserves to be placed in a category of its own. Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in the country as foreign workers, churches and even private acts of Christian prayer are banned; to enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s. Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.
It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem. No, the violence isn’t centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.
Ayaan concludes and offers her advice:
As for what the West can do to help religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries as leverage. Then there is trade and investment. Besides diplomatic pressure, these aid and trade relationships can and should be made conditional on the protection of the freedom of conscience and worship for all citizens.
Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world. Tolerance is for everyone—except the intolerant.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2 ... world.html
