The harrowing survivor stories, relayed in the Middle East Media Research Institute report “The Plight of the Iraqi Christians: An Update,” expose the cruelty of the murderers: A pregnant woman gunned down while her gravely wounded husband tries to protect her and their unborn child. A man ordered to convert to Islam before being shot in the head. A priest murdered in cold blood. Terrorists respond to a second priest’s query about why they slew a peaceful man of God with, “What do you expect us to do?” before killing him, too.
Since the time of their holy prophet and down through the ages, Muslims have persecuted Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Confucians, Taoists, Zoroastrians, agnostics and all freethinkers for being “infidels.” At the beginning of the last century, Islam established its dominance at the expense of Middle Eastern Christians by squashing their right to self-determination.
Contemptuous passages in the Koran only emboldened and justified their violence: Surah 3, ayat 85, declares, “If anyone desires a religion other than Islam, never will it be accepted of him; and in the hereafter he will be in the ranks of those who have lost all spiritual good.” Those combustible words are compounded by the blasphemous teachings of Islam’s prominent scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyya, a medieval theologian revered by today’s purist Muslims, in part, for his incendiary statements that churches are polytheist shrines, and that God exists only in mosques.
Christianity is the world’s leading religion with good reason. Even on a bad day it outranks Islam as a faith of peace and tremendous compassion, and its ordeal in the Muslim world is an ongoing abomination no matter how much terror-mongers, such as the Palestinian Authority, try to paint a glowing portrait of Muslim-Christian relations to promote their anti-Israeli agenda.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference’s push to pass a U.N. resolution condemning religious defamation — being voted on this week — should begin at its own dirty doorstep. In his Nov. 10 lecture at a community college in Pennsylvania about the persecution of Coptic Christians, Ashraf Ramelah stated: “The legal courts of Egypt do not ever rule against a Muslim when he has committed a crime against a non-Muslim, and this practice follows Islamic Sharia doctrine.”
Ramelah, who leads the human rights group, Voice of Copts, added: “Today, as in the past, Christian women and girls are kidnapped, raped and converted to Islam. Rape is part of Sharia.”
Hear the silence? That’s moderate Islam trying to set the record right.
