Only in Israel, where religious freedom is honored, have Christians increased, soaring from 34,000 in 1948 to 140,000 today.Read it all here (and post a comment to let it be known that it is an important issue).
Advocates for Islam talk about its history of tolerance, but political, revolutionary Islamism is the driving force in Mideast history today; it has little use for religious freedom. That has Christians literally running for their lives.
...In the rambling document, Breivik calls for a new "crusade" against Islam,
and quotes from the work of journalists and commentators (including, briefly,
me) who have spoken out against Islamic extremism and the refusal of our liberal
institutions -- including the media -- to hold Muslim leaders to account....
...The late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay hedonist whose
politics were to the left of the Democratic Party's, was routinely denounced in
European and American media as a member of the "far right" because he criticized
Muslim extremists on secular liberal grounds....
Al-Awwa further charged that Egypt's security forces cannot enter the monasteries to investigate for weapons—an amazing assertion, considering that Coptic monasteries are not only at the mercy of the state, but are easy prey to Islamist and Bedouin attacks, with monks tortured and crucifixes spat upon. When the monks of an ancient desert monastery in Egypt tried to erect a fence to keep the Bedouin raiders out, the military destroyed it and opened fire on the monks, while shouting "Allahu Akbar!"Read it here.
The problem is that religious authorities — the voices journalists quote — keep pinning this label on others. Thus, one expert’s “evangelical” is another’s “fundamentalist.” For “progressive” Catholics, in other words, Pope Benedict XVI is a “fundamentalist” on sexuality.I expect brother Mattingly will be offering more on this topic in the future.
Anyone who expects scholars to stand strong and defend a basic, historic definition will be disappointed. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame once quipped, among academics “fundamentalist” has become a “term of abuse or disapprobation” that most often resembles the casual semi-curse, “sumbitch.”
Moslems are proposing a 13-story $100,000,000.00 Million Dollar Mosque in the immediate debris field of the destroyed World Trade Center site in New York. Questions have been raised whether this Mosque would be an example of America's 'tolerance', or a Tribute to a great Moslem Conquest. Some have charged that the proposed complex’s name “Cordoba Cultural Center” reveals the intentions to be triumphalistic. Others relate the name to an historic era of peaceful coexistence on the Iberian Peninsula.
What history witnesses:
In 630, Muhammad led 10,000 Moslem soldiers into Mecca and turned the pagans' most prominent spot, the Ka'aba, into the Masjid al-Haram Mosque.
In 634, Rightly Guided Caliph Umar conquered Syria and turned the Christians' most prominent spot, the Church of Job, famous for being visited by Saint Silva in the fourth century, into the Mosque of Job.
In 637, Caliph Umar conquered Hebron and turned the second-most prominent spot in Judaism, the Cave of the Patriarchs, into the Ibrahimi Mosque. (This was repeated by Saladin in 1188.)
In 638, Moslem generals Amr ibn al-As and Khalid ibn al-Walid conquered Gaza and turned the prominent fifth-century Byzantine church into the Great Mosque of Gaza.
In 638, Caliph Umar conquered Jerusalem. In 691, Caliph Al-Malik ordered the Dome of the Rock built on the most prominent spot in Judaism, the Temple Mount, followed by Caliph Al-Walid building the Al-Aqsa Mosque there in 705.
In 651, Moslems conquered Persia and turned temples in Bukhara and Istakhr into mosques.
In 706, after Moslems took Damascus from the Byzantine Empire, Caliph Al-Walid turned the prominent Orthodox Church of St. John the Baptist into the Umayyad Mosque.
In 710, Gen. Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Pakistan, defiled the prominent Sun Temple in Multan, which housed the great idol "Sanam," and erected a Mosque.
In 784, after the conquest of Spain, Emir Abd ar-Rahman turned the prominent Visigothic Christian Church of Saint Vincent into the Great Aljama Mosque of Cordoba.
After the conquest of Egypt, Caliphs al-Mamun (813-833) and al-Hakim (996-1021) turned prominent Coptic Christian churches and Jewish synagogues in Cairo into mosques.
In 831, Moslems conquered Palermo, Sicily, and Asad ibn al-Furat turned the prominent Church of Saint Mary of the Assumption into the Great Mosque of Bal'harm.
In 1193, Moslems conquered Delhi, India, and Qutbuddin Aibak turned the Red Citadel in Dhillika, the most prominent spot of the last Hindu rulers, into the Qutb Minar Mosque.
From 1250-1517, Mamluk Moslems controlled the Golan Heights and used the ancient Synagogue of Katzrin as a mosque.
In 1387, Turkish Moslems conquered Thessaloniki and turned the Katholikon Monastery and the Church of Aghia Sophia, which housed the relics of Saint Gregorios Palamas, into Mosques, as Symeon of Thessaloniki recorded: "The greatest number of the buildings of the churches fell to them, of which the first was the Holy Church of the Savior. These were trampled underfoot and the infidels rejoiced in them. Most of the religious buildings in the city were despoiled, while altars were demolished and sacred things profaned."
On May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople and turned the great Byzantine church, Hagia Sophia, into the Ayasofya Mosque. The largest Church in Christendom for a thousand years, the church's four acres of gold mosaics were covered with whitewash and Quran verses.
In 1458, Sultan Mehmet II conquered Athens and turned the Greeks' most prominent spot, the Parthenon on Acropolis hill, into a mosque. When Venetian Gen. Francesco Morosini drove the Moslems out in 1687, a cannonball hit the gunpowder stored in the mosque, blowing it up.
In the 15th century, Ottoman invaders turned Saint Clement's Macedonian Orthodox Monastery in Plaosnik, Balkans, into the Imater Mosque.
From 1519-1858, Moslem Mughal rulers gained control of India and turned over 2,000 Hindu temples into Mosques, including demolishing the Temple of Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya, the birthplace of Rama, and replacing it with the Babri Mosque.
India's Mughal Moslem ruler, Jahangir (1605-1627), wrote in Tujuk-i-Jahangiri: "At the city of Banaras was a temple. I made it my plea for throwing down the temple and on the spot, with the very same materials, I erected the great Mosque."
In 1543, Hayreddin Barbarossa's 30,000 Moslem troops wintered in Toulon, France, and turned the prominent Toulon Cathedral into a Mosque.
In 1570, under Sultan Selim II Khan, Moslems conquered Paphos, Cyprus, and Gov. Mehmet Bey Ebubkir turned the prominent Christian church into the Great Mosque of Paphos.
In 1571, Moslems invaded Famagusta, Cyprus, and turned Saint Nicolas Cathedral, a rare Gothic church, into the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque, and Saint Sophia Cathedral in Nicosia, constructed in 1228, into the Selimiye Mosque.
In 1588, Sultan Murat III turned the Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint John the Forerunner in Constantinople into the Hirami Ahmet Pasha Mosque.
In 1781, after having conquered the Old City of Acre, Ottoman Moslems turned the Roman Catholic Church built by Crusaders into the Jezzar Ahmet Pasha Mosque, where a hair from Muhammad's beard is preserved.
In 1923, Moslems expelled Greeks from Turkey and turned Orthodox churches into mosques.
In World War II, Nazis allied with Bosnians and turned the prominent Artists' Gallery Museum in Zagreb, Croatia, into a mosque.
In the 1950s, Moslems expelled Jews from Arab lands and turned synagogues into Mosques.
Algerian Moslems warred against French colonial rule until the French took their Leave in 1962, after which the Cathedral of St. Philippe was turned into the Ketchaoua Mosque. Violence caused 30,000 Jews to flee and the Great Synagogue of Oran was turned into the Mosque Abdellah Ben Salem. In 1974, Turkish Moslems invaded northern Cyprus, and prominent Greek Orthodox Churches were turned into Mosques.
In 1981, Moslem immigrants to the Netherlands converted Amsterdam's historic Catholic Sint-Ignatiuskerk into the Fatih Mosque, and a synagogue in The Hague into the Aksa Mosque.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Moslems attacked the World Trade Center. In less than 10 years, the number of Mosques in New York City has skyrocketed to over 140. In light of History, would a Mosque in the immediate debris field of the Ground Zero site be a sign of America's 'tolerance', or a monument to a Great Moslem Victory over "The Great Satan"?
But America is being told—by the very people who have spent decades promoting the primacy of “feelings,” over thought, and who have declared that “a feeling is neither right or wrong”—to shut up, to not express its feelings, to not even have feelings, because those feelings are bad, stupid ones that are very, very wrong.
They are not afraid of the mosque or its members; they’re afraid of what the mosque will communicate—to the world and to themselves—as it rises so near the sterile ground where once stood two towers. They intuit that such a structure will signal a defeat more thorough than any found on a battlefield because it will suggest a defeat of the will, of priorities, ingenuity, of energy, and most importantly of identity.Read it Rhetorical Axes and Park51 here.
It has become a feature of today’s atheist chic to shy bricks at Christianity
for its record on slavery. This is part of a larger assault on Western history
and society, which, by accident or design, plays into the hands of those who are
today mounting on a global scale a sweeping and explicit cultural challenge to
Judeo-Christian as well as post-Christian values. The fundamentally most
misunderstood and overlooked aspect of today’s defense against the global jihad
is this challenge that Jihadists make to Western values, which are in large part
Judeo-Christian. Combine this with a historical critique that relentlessly
portrays the West as the aggressors against the rest of the world, and as
uniquely responsible for its evils, and Westerners’ will to defend something as
rotten as Western civilization begins to ebb away.
In Huntington’s unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.Read the entire essay here. Then email it to a friend.
Nowhere does the plight of Christians look so pitiful as in Turkey, nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the turn of the 20th century, some 500,000 Orthodox Christians, mostly ethnic Greeks, lived in Constantinople, where they constituted half the city's residents, and millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today, Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.Read the whole review here.
...
On first reading, this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East.
Hegazi case: Islam’s obsession with conversions
The case of Mohammad Hegazi, young Egyptian converted to Christianity, who wishes to be legally recognized as such, has opened a new debate in the Islamic world on conversions, which are often seen as acts of apostasy that merit death. What has emerged is a veritable obsession in Islam for personal conversions, this religion having been reduced more to an ethnic and sociological submission. There is even talk of a plan to convert Europe and the world to Islam, to which European governments are giving a hand. The first part in an analysis by Fr Samir Khalil Samir, Egyptian Jesuit, expert on Islam.
Beirut (AsiaNews) - The case has received a lot of public attention: a young Egyptian, Mohammad Ahmad Hegazi, age 25, converted to Christianity some years ago (some say 9, others 6 years ago; according to the Islamic version, it was just a few months ago!). He then married a woman named Zeinab, who also became Christian, taking the name Cristina. In recent months, he asked that his documents show his new religious affiliation. In Egypt, identity cards must indicate the holder’s religion and, so far, Hegazi’s is officially Islam. This means that he is considered to be Muslim for various legal questions pertaining to inheritance rights, family law etc.
His request was effectively been turned down by administrative authorities, who did not see his request through. So, Hegazi went to the government direct. Why did he ask for this change to be made only now, years after his conversion? Perhaps because the couple is expecting a baby. And if they are registered as Muslims, the child will have to be as well, regardless of the parents’ wishes.
When administrative authorities balked at his request, Hegazi went to the courts to claim his rights, with the help of a lawyer from an NGO. The case is extremely important, more than it may appear, also because it has been reported by media around the world and now the press in Egypt is also discussing it. Initially, reactions came from imams, then from the general public. The vast majority is saying that Mohammad Hegazi must be killed as an apostate. Only a small part dares to quote the Koran – which states that “there is no compulsion in religion” – and states its support for his freedom.
