Do Christians Bleed?: Unreported persecution in the Muslim world

National Review, Sept 16, 2002 by Rod Dreher

An Indonesian man with a lined, anxious face hands me a photograph from a magazine report on events in his homeland. I am looking at a photograph of the burned and decapitated corpse of a Christian man who was murdered in a Christmas Eve pogrom in his village. His killers were members of Laskar Jihad, a heavily armed Islamist terror group. "They cut off his genitals too," the Indonesian man explains. "He died at his church."

My informant, a Christian human-rights activist who refused to be identified, in order to protect his family, has photographs of Christian villages burned to the ground by Laskar Jihad. Numerous sources say the group has killed as many as 10,000 Indonesian Christians, forcibly converted thousands more, and demolished hundreds of churches. Activists say the Jakarta regime has only sporadically shown an interest in protecting the nation's Christian minority, and some accuse elements of the government and military of sympathy with the jihadists.

"I was in Indonesia when 9/11 happened, and I followed the statements of Muslim political leaders," says my informant. "They were encouraging Muslims to help Osama bin Laden. I was crying in my heart for New York, but I'm telling you, 9/11 happened once in New York, but it's happening every day to Christian villages in Indonesia."

Ann Buwalda, head of the Washington-based Jubilee Campaign USA, an international human-rights organization, says that between 50,000 and 60,000 Christians are now concentrated in the Tentena region, disarmed and surrounded by Laskar Jihad encampments. The besieged Christian community spent August awaiting a jihad assault rumored to be coming any day. Says Buwalda, "In the event that the government continues to do nothing against Laskar Jihad, these Christians will be slaughtered."

Indonesian Christians are not alone in suffering under this barbarism. Minority Christian populations throughout the Islamic world endure persecution in varying degrees. From southeast Asia through Arab lands and into northern Africa, Christians and believers in other minority religions live with degradation, discrimination, and worse.

By consensus, Sudan continues to be the worst of a bad lot. The Arab Islamic government in the north continues its genocidal war upon the black Christians and animists in the south. Freedom House, the venerable human-rights organization, estimates that in the past 17 years, two million Christians and animists have been slaughtered by the Islamist regime, with over twice that number turned into refugees. Churches continue to be bombed, women and children raped, and non- Muslims kidnapped and forced into slavery.

Nigeria has been in the news lately because an Islamic court in the country's north sentenced to death by stoning a woman who gave birth out of wedlock; she will be executed when she weans her baby, the jurists decided. Pakistan, which has been home to a small Christian population for almost as long as there have been Christians, has been the site of grisly anti-Christian pogroms. In Saudi Arabia, foreigners are deported for practicing Christianity, and Saudi Christians, if caught, are beheaded.

Even Egypt treats its Coptic Christian minority as second-class citizens, and is rather less than vigilant about protecting them from attack by Islamic extremists. The Copts dare not complain, figuring they're better off living under the regime of president-for-life Hosni Mubarak than under the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. It's a humiliating choice, but it guarantees their survival, for now.

Paul Marshall, senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, says violent Islamic persecution of Christians is a relatively recent phenomenon. He blames it on the rise of extremist Islam of the sort bankrolled by the Saudis, which gained a foothold in many of these countries as European colonizers withdrew. "Another factor is that the previous secular gods -- socialism and Arab nationalism -- have failed," says Marshall, author of the forthcoming Islam at the Crossroads. "If you don't like the spread of Western cultural commodities around the world, where do you turn? To Islam. The movement we're looking at is the move for the restoration of a radical Islamic caliphate."

But Bat Ye'or, the preeminent scholar of dhimmitude -- the condition of second-class status with which Jews and Christians have historically had to live under Islamic rule -- insists that persecution is the normal state of relations between the dhimmis and their Muslim rulers. In effect, European conquerors suspended history in those lands when they abolished Islamic shari'a law and the dhimmitude it mandated, and imposed Western concepts of equality under the law. "Dhimmitude was a dehumanizing system, bordering on slavery," Ye'or says. "After decolonization, dhimmitude for Christians and other non-Muslims is coming back with the return of shari'a rule. It is a repetition of the past, because it follows the traditional pattern of Islamic history and jurisdiction."