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Religious Intolerance in Action <<
By Phyllis Chesler
For centuries, Muslims committed genocide against Hindus in India and what is now Pakistan. Today, in Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Kenya, Turkey, Pakistan, Gaza, and Iran, it’s open season on Christians.
Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese journalist who is facing 40 lashes for “indecency” because she wore trousers – has recently been barred from leaving Sudan.
Interestingly, Hussein is a Christian, not a Muslim; she is also a former UN worker. (For the sake of this lawsuit, she immediately quit her UN job which would have provided her with immunity from such prosecution). The Sudanese Islamist authorities are not allowing her to do an interview in Lebanon. Sarkozy, who has called for a ban of the burqa in France, has invited Hussein to Paris. Please note: In Sudan, non-Muslim women are being punished if they do not dress according to Islamist standards.
All infidels, including the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) are an endangered species in Muslim countries. Always have been.
Christians are being slaughtered in Pakistan by Muslim mobs for refusing to convert; for being Christians; and for allegedly setting fire to a Quran. Young Pakistani Christian girls are being kidnapped, raped, “married” to Muslim men and then forced to convert. Recently, a rampaging Muslim mob burned eight Christians alive, destroyed 50 houses and destroyed a church in the village of Gojra.
Earlier this month, Pakistani Christians finally closed their schools and peacefully protested their country’s “blasphemy” laws.
Recently, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a thirteen-year-old Nigerian Christian girl described how the Boko Haram butchered her pastor (hacked him to death, then set him on fire) for the crime of being a Christian. Captured, the girl and 100 other girls and women were given the choice of converting to Islam or remaining imprisoned. Their male counterparts were given the choice of conversion or death.
The local African Christians cannot understand why the western media have “disregarded the targeted nature of (these) attacks and the brutal murders of Christian pastors.”
In bloodthirsty Iran, two women are in jail and on trial – for being Christian, for having dared to convert from Islam. They are apostates and apostasy, (leaving Islam) is a capital offense.
Maryam Rustampoor, 27, and Marzieh Amirizadeh, 30, have been jailed in Evin Prison for the last five months and have been kept in solitary, tortured, and denied medical treatment. Earlier this week they nevertheless courageously stood up to their interrogator. Although one of the women is in severe pain, they both refused to renounce their faith. The courtroom dialogue resembles the trial of Joan of Arc. The two women claimed that “God had convinced them through the Holy Spirit.” Their interlocutor stated “It is impossible for God to speak with humans,” – to which Amirizadeh replied: “Are you questioning whether God is Almighty?”
Deputy Prosecutor: “You were Muslims and now you have become Christians.”
The Women: “We were born in Muslim families, but we were not Muslims.”
I have been noting the persecution of Christians for some time now. Christianity, which predates Islam in the Middle East and in central Asia, has been under deadly attack from the moment Islam was born. Constantinople was once the capital of Byzantium, Eastern Christianity, but was conquered by Turkish Sultan Mehmet II in the mid-fifteenth century. Thereafter, the most beautiful churches became beautiful mosques, Christians were either converted by the sword, forced to live as second-class citizens, as “dhimmis;” like the Jews, if they were lucky, they were allowed to flee, but only if they left their land, homes, businessness, and wealth behind.
What will happen as more and more fundamentalist Muslims move to the West? The West, despite all its considerable faults for which our leaders keep apologizing, (racism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism), is nevertheless religiously tolerant and multi-culturally relativist. Will fundamentalist Muslims learn tolerance from us, learn how to live-and-let-live? Or will they keep to themselves and continue to view and treat non-Muslims in the West as…unclean, sub-human, better off dead if not converted?
When will Westerners truly understand that it is not only the West that has engaged in imperialism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism, but that the so-called East has done so too? African and Arab Muslims had a heavy hand in the African slave trade and, to this day, still keep slaves; Islam is a primarily imperialist venture which has colonized huge tracts of other people’s land. And, how would anyone describe the traffic in oil, drugs, and sex slaves which Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan are currently engaged in as anything other than rank capitalism?
But I digress. Will America stand up for religious tolerance abroad or will we view this matter as each country’s sacred, sovereign decision – unless that country is Israel? Yes, ‘tis true: Christians are also persecuted in China, Vietnam, and North Korea – but this is precisely my point. Totalitarian regimes, whether they are communist, Maoist, or Islamist, all forbid freedom of speech and conscience, and always persecute those who choose to practice a religion as opposed to surrendering to the cult of the state.
Will fundamentalist Muslims in America allow their sons and daughters to convert to another religion? Or will they immediately kill them? Stay tuned for more on this very subject.
(Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the well known author of classic works, including the bestseller The New Anti-Semitism. She is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women's studies, the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women's Health Network. Her website is www.phyllis-chesler.com)