An explosion ripped through a Catholic church during Christmas Mass near Nigerias capital Abuja on Sunday morning, killing at least 25 people. A radical Muslim group, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility for the attack and another bombing in the city of Jos, as explosions also struck the nations predominantly Muslim northeast. The Christmas Day attacks show the growing national ambition of Boko Haram, was responsible for some 500 murders this year alone. The assaults come a year after a series of Christmas Eve bombings in Jos claimed by the militants left at least 32 dead and 74 wounded.
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Egypts dwindling Copts have seen their position deteriorate over the past year from precarious to perilous. Already facing discrimination and harassment from Mubaraks secular regime, they now see that things could get a lot worse under the Islamists who are poised to take power. Their annus horribilis started on New Years Day 2011, when a powerful car bomb targeted a Coptic church in Alexandria, killing 25 parishioners and wounding nearly 100 just as they were finishing midnight Mass. The next turning point was the Maspero massacre on October 9, when 27 unarmed Christian protesters were killed and hundreds more injured, not by some shadowy Islamic extremists but by the military. An official commissionestablished by the Armyhas unsurprisingly absolved the Army of all responsibility for the killings.
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The Christian community in Iraq was some two million strong before the US-led invasion of 2003. Up to four-fifths are estimated to have left the country in recent years following a series of attacks by Muslim extremists. On October 31, 2010, an Al-Qaeda assault on a Baghdad church left 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security force members dead.
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Syria has the largest Christian community in the region, some 2.5 million strong. Most of them are supporting President Bashar Al Assad amidst ongoing protests in the country. A Syrian Christian explained that they prefer a brutal dictator who guarantees the rights of religious minorities to the uncertain future that Assads departure might bring. It is not to be doubted that if the Obama Administration is successful in its stated objective of bringing Assad down, the Christians in Syria will follow their Iraqi brethren into exile.
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Two thousand miles further east, Asia Bibi, a mother of five children, is one of a dozen Christians in the province of Punjab currently awaiting appeal or execution under Pakistans scandalous blasphemy laws. On Christmas Day, after a year in jail, she will not be able to say prayers or to see her children and husband. She is being held in isolation, has not been allowed to bathe for over two months, and cannot stand unsupported. It is worthy of note that Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated last January and Federal Minorities Minister Shahbaz_Bhatti was killed in March for defending Asia Bibi and criticizing Pakistans blasphemy laws.
Pakistan has a constitution that guarantees religious freedom, but murders, discrimination, and violent harassment of its small Christian minority are persistent. Any dispute with a Muslimmost commonly over landcan become a religious confrontation. Christians are routinely accused of blasphemy against Islam, an offense that carries the death penalty. Charges of blasphemy can be made on the flimsiest of evidenceone mans word against another, and since it is invariably a Muslims word against that of a Christian, the outcome is preordained. The ease with which blasphemy charges can be made to stick has led to a spate of malicious complaints motivated by personal enmity and greed, especially for the Christians land. On many occasions Christians charged with blasphemy have been murdered before their cases reached the courts.
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The scene is the same in Alexandria, Aceh, Istanbul, Prishtina, Karachi, Nazareth... Heavily armed police guard churches as hostile crowds look on. Wherever Muslim numbers dominate, Christians have reason to fear for their safety.
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As he progressed from a moral teacher to the secular ruler of Medina and master of peoples destinies, Muhammad made the final break with the Jews and Christians, who are fiercely denounced. The Muslims must be merciless to the unbelievers but kind to each other. (48:29) Whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them. (5:55) The punishment for resistance is execution or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides. (5:33) Muhammad was no longer trying to convert; Allah is a repetitive polemicist rejoicing in infidel suffering.
Thirteen centuries of Islam have effectively eliminated Christianity from the land of its birth. The terminal decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of the region their percentages have been reduced to single digits. Whether they disappear will partly depend on Western leaders belatedly expressing their outrage at Christian persecution.
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It is a near-certainty, however, that that someone will not be the U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama.
If the Jewish or Muslim population of America or Western Europe were to start declining at the rate at which Christian communities are disappearing in the Middle East, there would be an outcry from their coreligionists all over the world. There would be government-funded programs to establish the causes and provide remedies. The endangered minority would be awarded instant victim status and would be celebrated as such by the media and the academy. By contrast, when the President of the United States visited Jerusalem in October 1994, he was steps away from the most sacred Christian shrines but did not visit any of them. He did not meet a single representative of the Christian community, which remained invisible to him.
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The one crucial difference between the Gospels and the Kuran is Gods love and His desire to redeem sinners by way of sacrifice.
