Targeting Christians In Muslim Lands

As the world continues to grow smaller, the Muslim world’s indigenous Christians are being identified with free Christians in the West. Muslim perceptions of the West affect the treatment of Christians in Muslim lands. Race or geography is not important; shared religion makes them all liable for one another. This practice of actually attacking one set of Christians or non-Muslims in general, in response to another — has roots in Islamic law. The Pact of Omar, a foundational text for Islam’s treatment of Dhimmis (i.e., non-Muslims who refused to convert after their lands were seized by Islam) makes this clear. The consequences of breaking any conditions that Christians were made to accept in order to be granted a degree of security by the Muslim state were severe. A rule broken by a single individual Dhimmis could result in jihad being enacted against the whole community. Raymond Ibrahim, the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, puts this ancient practice into a modern perspective:

In 2006, when Pope Benedict quoted history deemed unflattering to Islam, Christians around the Muslim world paid the price: anti-Christian riots ensued, churches were burned, and a nun was murdered in Somalia. That was then. Days ago, when a Christian in Egypt was accused of dating a Muslim woman, twenty-two Christian homes were set ablaze, to cries of “Allah Akbar.” Countless other examples of one group of Christians in the Muslim world being “punished” in response to other Christians exist.

In fact, the recent carnage in Baghdad, wherein Islamists stormed a church during mass, killing over fifty Christian worshippers, was a “response” to Egypt’s Coptic Christian church, which Islamists accuse of kidnapping and torturing Muslim women to convert to Christianity. (Ironically, the well documented reality in Egypt is that Muslims regularly kidnap and force Christian women to convert to Islam: these accusations are part of a new trend whereby Islamists project their own crimes onto the Copts.) And the al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists who perpetrated the Baghdad church massacre have further threatened Christians around the world. . . .

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