November-December 2007 – “From Nigeria to Indonesia, Christians are under siege in virtually every single country in the Muslim world, the victims of countless acts of discrimination, depredation, brutality, and murder that are so widespread and systematic that it can rightfully be called the new Holocaust,” said writer Patrick Poole on the Web site American Thinker.

Historians might legitimately argue with Poole’s assessment – after all, six million murdered Jews will be a hard number to top, even for Muslim extremists – but his heartfelt concerns are certainly justifiable.

As believers struggle against a vigorous secularism in the West, their brothers and sisters in the Muslim world daily face beatings, murder, rape, extortion, the seizure of property, and forced conversion to Islam.

Burned beyond recognition
In its “Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom” (USCIRF, www.uscirf.gov), released in May 2007, that commission cites evidence to suggest that Christians living in Muslim countries are facing frightening times ahead.

In Egypt, for example, the Coptic Orthodox Christian community continues to experience persecution. According to tradition, the Copts have existed in Egypt for two millennia, having been founded in Alexandria by Saint Mark, who wrote the Gospel of the same name.

In Islam Review, Magdi Khalil, executive director of the Middle East Freedoms Forum, said that since the early 1970s, “the Copts have been at the receiving end of attacks that number in the hundreds and vary in magnitude from minor harassments to major vicious assaults, with no end in sight.”

According to the USCIRF, the Egyptian government has done very little to either prevent such violence or prosecute it – and often even participates in it. “Members of Egypt’s non-Muslim religious minorities, particularly Christians and Bahais, report discrimination, interference, harassment, and surveillance by the Egyptian state security services,” the report said.

Meanwhile, in the Nigerian state of Gombe, which is primarily Muslim, Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported the case of a Christian teacher who was murdered by a mob of Muslim students, who accused her of tearing a copy of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. An article on ChristianToday.com said the woman had merely torn a book in which a Muslim student had hidden a cheat sheet during an exam.

“She was stoned, stripped, beaten, and stabbed to death, and her body was later burned beyond recognition,” the article said. The attack lasted an hour, and Muslim students soon began chanting the names of other Christian teachers at the school.

The article further stated that the 16 suspects involved had been released without charge, an ominous sign for Christians there.

Even in nations which regularly interact with the West, like Saudi Arabia, the oppression of religious minorities by the government is intense. “The Saudi government continues to engage in an array of severe violations of human rights as part of its repression of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief,” according to the USCIRF report. “Abuses include: torture and cruel and degrading treatment or punishment imposed by judicial and administrative authorities; prolonged detention without charges and often incommunicado; and blatant denials of the right to liberty and security of the person, including coercive measures aimed at women and the broad jurisdiction of the mutawaa (religious police), whose powers are vaguely defined and exercised in ways that violate the religious freedom of others.”

A peaceful religion?
It cannot be stressed enough that the Muslim persecution of Christians is religiously motivated. Despite political statements to the contrary, believers in many Muslim countries are looking around in vain for the type of Islam which U.S. President Bush has glibly called “a peaceful religion.”

In Indonesia two years ago, for example, the USCIRF report said Muslim extremists “beheaded three Christian girls, shot two others waiting for a school bus, attacked Protestant religious leaders and services, and bombed a pork market and a Hindu temple. …”

To parody the old Wendy’s commercial, where’s the peace?

Khalil said that in Egypt, violence against Christians often followed an obviously religiously-oriented pattern. The attacks most often occurred either on a Sunday or some other special, religious holy day for Copts; or following the noon Friday religious service at the local mosque – the time at which devout Muslims offered prayers and heard a sermon from the imam, a Muslim clergyman.

Outbreaks of violence, Khalil said, “followed an almost identical scenario: a rumor is spread, a leaflet is circulated among the crowds calling them to jihad [holy war], and speaking of the triumph of Islam and Muslims and the due punishment of infidels. The crowds who listen to the fiery sermons of the Friday prayers are incited to hatred and violence, and pushed to the edge, they rush out of worship places to engage in a mad round of killing, pillage, and destruction, preying on peaceful citizens. The angry crowds may include hundreds and sometimes even thousands as was the case in October 2005, in Alexandria.”

The persecution of Christians in nations like Lebanon has caused many believers to flee their own country.

Michael Hirst, a journalist for London’s Sunday Telegraph, said that in a poll of Maronites, which is the largest Christian denomination in Lebanon and which makes up 22% of the country’s population, almost half said they were considering emigrating. Nearly a third of those said they had already applied for a visa.

“Their exodus could have a devastating effect on the country,” Hirst said, “robbing it of an influential minority which has acted as an important counter-balance to the forces of Islamic extremism.”

Radicals stirring the pot
That last word – extremism – appears to be of critical significance in the growing pressure upon Christians in many Muslim nations. While Muslims and Christians had lived peacefully side by side for generations in these Islamic countries, the rise of a more aggressive form of Islam seems to have triggered both persecution and the resulting exodus.

“Christians are fleeing Lebanon to escape political and economic crises and signs that radical Islam is on the rise in the country,” Hirst said.

Father Samir Khalil Samir, a Jesuit teacher at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut, agreed with that assessment. “Lebanon has always been a bastion of religious tolerance, but now it is moving towards the model of Islamisation seen in Iraq and Egypt,” he told the Telegraph.

Indonesia is a prime example of a Muslim society that seems to be departing from a more moderate past. According to the USCIRF report, there are “growing concerns that more militant strains of Islam are having a greater influence on attitudes, gaining political strength in some local areas, and possibly inciting mobs to communal violence or acts of terrorism.”

The USCIRF said this is happening in Indonesia despite the fact that radical Muslims are not a majority in that country. “Religious extremists are a small but influential minority in Indonesia and there is evidence that support for extremist positions is on the rise among Indonesian Muslims,” said the report.

The average Muslim sometimes seems only too willing to heed the call to violence issued by radicals. The USCIRF said “extremist groups have incited mobs and intimidated local officials to close churches, mosques, and temples.”

Another location where persecution of Christians has been initiated by radicals is in the Gaza Strip, located on the Mediterranean Sea along the western edge of Israel.

The Israeli news source YNetNews.com reported that members of Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organization that seized power in the region in June, attacked and desecrated a Roman Catholic school and convent days later. Along with ransacking the buildings, radicals destroyed crosses, prayer books, and a statue of Jesus. One Muslim leader there warned that Christians who engaged in “missionary activity” would be “dealt with harshly.”

Moderate Muslims to the rescue?
One of the questions repeatedly asked by frustrated Westerners is this: Why aren’t moderate Muslims resisting the Islamisation of their own countries?

The answer seems to be that at least some of them are subject to intense pressure themselves. In countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia, Islamic radicals are apparently as quick to turn on their Muslim opponents as they are on anyone else who resists them.

“Moderate Muslim leaders and members of religious minorities report that they continue to face pressure, intimidation, or sometimes violence from protestors organized by extremist groups,” the USCIRF report said of the latter country. “There are fears that Indonesia’s culture of pluralism and tolerance is being slowly eroded by those espousing an extremist interpretation of Islam.”

Members of extremist Muslim groups “have used pressure, intimidation, or violence against those whose views or actions they found unacceptable. Their actions have included intimidating judges and local officials; … threatening moderate Muslims or those considered ‘deviant’; and forcing the closure of some non-Muslim businesses during Ramadan.”

It is therefore questionable as to whether or not moderate Muslims who do not want to live under Islamic fundamentalism could be successful in stopping radicals from taking over.

Of course, such news is even worse for Christians, who are experiencing terrors in these Muslim nations undreamt of in the relative safety of the West. For them, the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam around the globe is a threat which they can only pray does not turn into a new holocaust.