Wakeley is merely Islam’s latest attack against Christianity
The guilt or innocence of the 16-year-old accused of stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and three others at Wakeley’s Assyrian Church of Christ the Good Shepherd last week will ultimately be tested in court, as will that of any accomplices. But what the incident confirms, were further confirmation needed, is the continued vehemence of Islamism’s hostility to Christianity.
Islamist attacks on churches are scarcely isolated incidents. In France alone there were more than 600 attacks on Christian places of worship in 2020, culminating in the murder of three parishioners at Nice’s Basilica of Notre Dame by an Islamist carrying a Koran.
Meanwhile, violence against Christians remains endemic in the Arab Middle East, where the share of Christians in the population has, over the course of the past century, collapsed from around 14 per cent to barely 3 per cent.
Seen in the longer term, the eradication of Christianity from its regions of birth appears even more starkly. In AD732, when Islam consolidated its hegemony over what later became the Arab lands, Christians were by far the majority of the population in the Oriental patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, as well as in North Africa.
Now, after centuries of persecution, those ancient churches are becoming an insignificant presence, with their Middle Eastern congregations accounting for less than 1 per cent of Christians worldwide.
Whether that persecution has a clear basis in the Koran is controversial. It is, however, indisputable that the Koran directly condemns Christianity, claiming that Christians “accept two gods”, will not “tolerate you (Muslims) until you follow their religion” and wilfully lie about the Bible.
Moreover, the so-called “verse of the sword” – which, according to many Islamic scholars, abrogates the Koran’s more tolerant affirmations – enjoins Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them”, sparing them only if they “repent, perform the prayer and pay alms”.
And according to a tradition authoritatively reported by Malik ibn Anas (711-795), the Prophet’s last words were “May God fight the Jews and the Christians! Two religions will not remain in the land of the Arabs.”
It is therefore unsurprising that the Muslim conquest was viewed by Mesopotamian Christians as an apocalyptic disaster, with the first substantial Christian commentary warning that there is “no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men’s blood”.
The construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, with the explicit denunciation of Christian belief in its magnificent gold leaf inscriptions, merely heightened their fears, which were confirmed when sweeping restrictions on Christian worship, along with deliberately humiliating rules of conduct and punitive taxes, were formalised in the mid-9th century.
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After increasing in each decade, that violence reached a peak in the period immediately prior to, during and just after the short-lived rule of the Hamas-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, when at least 150 Copts were murdered, many thousands rendered homeless, and Coptic churches and monasteries stormed – with 64 churches being attacked, and 23 incinerated, in a single day.
It is therefore unsurprising that 100,000 Copts fled Egypt between March and September 2011 alone; and since then the haemorrhage has continued, as have the murders, the kidnappings, rapes and forced conversions of young women, the destruction of homes and the coerced evacuations of Coptic villages.
Nor is that pattern confined to Egypt: its latest manifestation is the expulsion from their ancestral home of Karabakh’s entire Christian population, and the demolition of one of the Caucasus’s most iconic churches, by the Muslim government of Azerbaijan – all without a peep being heard from our keffiyeh-touting protesters.
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Bernard Lewis famously stated some years ago that “for Christians and Muslims alike, tolerance is a new virtue and intolerance a new crime”. The great historian was only half right: Christianity has changed, but tolerance has scarcely made its mark in the Islamic world, and when it has, it has invariably struggled. With religious and ethnic diversity – and hence genuine religious freedom – vanishing in the Muslim countries, while Australia’s diversity inexorably rises, our much vaunted multiculturalism cannot be an excuse for tolerating a fanaticism that, still today, so readily morphs into murder.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/wakeley-is-merely-islams-latest-attack-against-christianity/news-story/adf8bbb63d2669b2d221e5cca7a2abdd
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Islam is the cause of the conflict (Read 6049 times)
