Around the U.S., and particularly at the most elite college campuses, seemingly smart and well-educated young people keep up their passionate protests in support of the Hamas rapists and murderers and against Israel and Jews generally. The claimed reason for the protests is that Israel is engaged in “apartheid” or “genocide,” or even the ultimate evil, “settler colonialism.” Yet meanwhile, the world is filled with state actors treating their own or neighboring populations in the most appalling ways, far worse than anything that Israel could remotely be accused of, without attracting anything like the passion and vitriol directed at Jews and Israel.
Think North Korea, keeping its own population in permanent prison conditions, and often starving; or China, cracking down on all dissent and even confining large sub-populations (e.g., Uyghurs) in slave labor camps; or Azerbaijan, which expelled an entire Christian community of about 150,000 people just a few months ago. These examples, let alone the human rights abuses in places like Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, attract almost no interest from our passionate student demonstrators, not to mention even slight notice from the press or anyone else.
How to explain this discrepancy? In recent weeks I have seen multiple writers advance the hypothesis that this is not really about Israel specifically, but rather that Israel is just the proxy of the moment for broad hatred for the West, for capitalism, for America, and for civilization generally. That hypothesis at least offers an explanation for why all bad actors who are not of the West or of capitalism, no matter how reprehensible they may be, get a total pass. In any event, I don’t have another hypothesis that can explain that anomaly.
Consider the ongoing treatment of Christians in the Muslim world. (I might suggest considering the ongoing treatment of Jews in the Muslim world, except that Jews have been almost entirely expelled and eliminated from the Muslim world, with the result that there is no remaining “ongoing treatment” to discuss.). The treatment of Christians by Muslims in Muslim countries would be almost impossible to learn about except for the work of a single guy named Raymond Ibrahim. Ibrahim scours obscure local news sources, and also frequently interviews sources on the ground in various Muslim-majority countries, and he then puts out regular reports of the ongoing atrocities in these places.
For example, there is Egypt. Egypt is a large-population country (about 114 million), immediately adjacent to Israel. To look at the face of the existing laws of Egypt, you would think that it is completely tolerant of at least the major religions. In 2022, when the U.S. State Department put out a Report on International Religious Freedom, it gave Egypt a basically favorable review, albeit with a few qualifications. Excerpt:
The constitution states that “freedom of belief is absolute” and “the freedom of practicing religious rituals and establishing worship places for the followers of divine religions [i.e., the three Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism] is a right regulated by law.” The constitution states citizens “are equal before the law” and criminalizes discrimination and “incitement to hatred” based upon religion. . . . The government officially recognizes Sunni Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and allows only their adherents to publicly practice their religion and build houses of worship. “Disdaining and disrespecting” the three Abrahamic religions and supporting “extremist” ideologies are crimes.
Does that sound pretty good? Perhaps; but it turns out that that is not how things work on the ground. On the ground, Muslims persecute and harass Christians, and the government does little to nothing to stop them. Indeed, the authorities are generally sympathetic to the Muslim harassers.
In a December 2022 piece for Coptic Solidarity, Ibrahim got information from an Egyptian named Magdi Khalil as to the disparate treatment of churches versus mosques in Egypt:
Th[e] disparity [in numbers of churches versus mosques in Egypt] underscores the extreme discrimination Christians face in Egypt. Considering that Copts make up, at the very least, 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 104 million, there is one mosque or prayer hall for every 83 Muslims, but only one church for every 2,000 Christians. . . . In 2016, a new Egyptian law was touted as “easing” restrictions on and helping many more churches to open. Since its implementation, however, human rights groups have noted that it has only marginally helped. . . . Egypt make[s] it immensely hard for Christians to open or maintain churches, [and] the government does not contribute a “single penny” to their survival said Khalil. Churches are even required to pay their utility bills, which no mosque in Egypt does, as the government happily picks up their bill.
Ibrahim’s latest report from Egypt appears on his own website, raymondibrahim.com, on April 11. It seems that a large church “caught fire” in a town called Akhmim, about 300 miles South of Cairo. The region is known for Islamic radicalism. Ibrahim:
On Sunday, Mar. 24, 2024, a fire broke out in the Church of St. George in Akhmim, Sohag governorate. . . . [A]ttacks on churches in Egypt are commonplace. According to one researcher, Magdi Khalil, “close to one thousand churches have been attacked or torched by mobs in the last five decades [since the 1970s] in Egypt.” More recently, churches continue to burn, though these are increasingly being dismissed as accidents—including 11 churches that mysteriously “caught fire” in one month alone (Aug. 2022). It’s worth noting that “accidental” fires in mosques in Egypt—which outnumber churches by a ratio of 40 to 1—are almost unheard of.
Here is a round-up from around the world of Muslim persecution of Christians within the last month or so, dated yesterday, April 28, by Ibrahim writing at the Gatestone Institute. It includes reports from countries as disparate as Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen. And don’t forget the March 22 attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow, Russia, where 139 people were killed. ISIS took credit in a statement that said the attack was designed to target “thousands of Christians.” Ibrahim also includes a lengthy quote from another ISIS statement issued about two months before the Russia attack. Excerpt:
"Chase your preys whether Jewish, Christian or their allies, on the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Break into their homes, kill them and steal their peace of mind by any means you can lay hands on..... [S]hoot them with bullets, cut their throats with sharp knives, and run them over with vehicles. A sincere person will not lack the means to draw blood from the hearts of the Jews, the Christians, and their allies, and thus ease the suffering in the hearts of the believers. Come at them from every door, kill them by the worst of means, turn their gatherings and celebrations into bloody massacres, do not distinguish between a civilian kaffir, and a military one, for they are all kuffar and the ruling against them is one....”
And on and on and on. It’s completely unclear to me how people of any other religion, or of no religion, are supposed to co-exist peacefully with this.
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