Will the meek ever inherit the world?

Will the meek ever inherit the world?

Not while they remain impotent in the face of Islamist slaughter.

Original Thinking by Barry Shaw.

Christians are being slaughtered across the Islamic crescent of the Middle East and down into Africa. We hear of daily outrages against Christians and their churches. Two Islamic suicide bombers blew themselves up outside an ancient church in Peshawar in Pakistan killing eighty one Christian worshippers. This is yet another bloody assault against non-Muslims in the name of Islam that has plagued Pakistan for over a decade.

In Egypt it is estimated that over two hundred churches have been attacked and destroyed by Muslims. Christians have been killed and many others are fleeing Egypt. Morsi, the failed Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt, blamed Christians for his downfall. This led to a rage of violence targeting Christians in their homes and in their places of worship.

In Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, non-Muslims were selected for execution for not being Muslims. Fortunately, Israeli Jews managed to escape the carnage leaving Christians to be shot to death for not knowing the name of Mohammed’s mother.

These are only a few examples of the thousands that plague the Islamic world.

Closer to home, Bethlehem, when under Israeli control, had a Christian population in excess of eighty percent. Since Israel handed authority over to the Palestinians, the Christian population in this significantly Christian holy town has reduced to less than twenty percent, and a number of those are priest, nuns, and administrators of their religious shrines.

Professor Justus Reid Weiner of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has documented the human rights abuses perpetrated against Christians in Palestinian society. This has led to a fall in numbers down to less than 1.7% of the general population. Their plight, he writes, is down to the adoption of Sharia law in the Palestinian Authority Constitution. Moreover, he says, they feel abandoned by their church leaders who, instead of protecting them, prefer to curry favor with the Palestinian leadership.

It is the failure of the Christian leadership globally that is a worrying part of the persecution of their co-religionists.

Just as secular and moderate Muslims have, generally, chosen to remain silent in the face of the genocidal violence of Islamists, so prominent world Christian leaders and churches are turning the other cheek to the slaughter of their fellow men and women.

In South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the South African Council of Churches prefer to side with the religion that is killing their flock in an unholy alliance against Israel. They have nothing to say about the Islamic bloody rampage that is creeping out of the Middle East down into Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Kenya, and in their direction. They give wholehearted fervent support for the demonizers and delegitimizers of Israel even as their fellow Christians are screaming out for their help and salvation from the brutal hands of these people.  But their voices are silent. They continue to praise the anti-Israel extremists who organize ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ even as the Arabs perpetrate real apartheid, murder, and destruction against the people they have been appointed to protect. The shame, the fraud, and the crime of their mistake is demonstrated by Israel as being the one country in across the crescent of North Africa and the Middle East in which the Christian population has grown and prospered. Even in Lebanon the Christians quake in fear, those who are left, of course.

While Christians were being gunned down, knifed, beheaded, blown up, live in fear in their thousands throughout the Middle East including Syria and into Africa, during the Feat of Tabernacles over five thousand Christians were joyously expressing their love of Israel and Jews as they paraded proudly and freely in the streets of Jerusalem.

Maybe that is because they know that Israel is the true and faithful guardian of their holy places in the Holy Land. They also share a secret with Israel that seems to have been missed by most of their leaders back home, that both of our faiths are under a clear and present threat from a religion that has one global ambition – to kill or to subjugate non-Muslims.

We are in a war for our very survival, both Christians and Jews.  To echo the words of Jerusalem Post Op-Ed editor, Seth Frantzman, Islamism should be made a crime against humanity (“It’s time to define Islamism as a crime against humanity” Jerusalem Post, 23 September, 2013), and not appeased. Not only would this protect Jews and Christians, but it would also safeguard the interests of voiceless Muslims who do not subscribe to the murderous crusading voice of Islam.

Why am I, an Israeli Jew, be writing this article? Why is it that Seth Frantzman, another Israeli Jew, the one to propose that Islamism be outlawed? 

Why aren't these words resounding from church pulpits, from the Vatican, from the parliaments of the Christians and Muslims, from Muslim lobbying groups, from world bodies?  Well, to begin with, it’s because they are in denial. When was the last time, if ever, you heard anyone in the Obama Administration refer to this global slaughter as Islamic terrorism? Never!

As for the weakness of the Christian Church, they need to find the moral courage to confront this evil that is afflicting their parishioners.

All have failed to raise the issue and left the world bereft of any remedy.

The deep heart of this Islamic terror is not deprivation, or oppression, as liberal progressive academics and politicians would have us believe. It is all about religious malevolent venom, a dark hatred of the other, a dangerous ideology to impose a religious creed by coercion, force, violence and terror.

So tell the progressive liberals and think tank ‘experts’ to stop examining their navels for scabs in our body politic and face the obvious truth.

Voices have been muzzled by official secular appeasement, and the charge of “Islamaphobia” against anyone expressing their fear.
If Islamaphobia is the fear of Islam there is genuine cause for that fear.

The first to adopt Frentzman’s Law should be the secular and moderate Muslims who occasionally tell us that what Islamists are doing is not the real Islam.

We non-believers are so busy being attacked and slaughtered in the name of Islam that we cannot accept that argument. We know who is targeting and killing us, and they are Islamists. So, non-violent Muslims, the ones without an agenda for our destruction, should be the first to promote this law to reject terror and the imposition of Sharia law in the name of their religion on non-compliant societies.

To do so would lead to mutual respect and peaceful co-existence. Remaining silent proves they are siding with our enemy, simply biding their time until the moment they decide to join the army of Islam, raise their sword, and cry ‘Allah Akbar!’

The call for Sharia in the name of Allah should not be a part of democratic debate. Neither should it be perceived as freedom of speech or worship in any democratic society. It should be seen as a political and religious imposition of an ideology as alien as fascism. Like fascism and anti-Semitism, it should be placed beyond the pale and outlawed as a crime against humanity and a free society. Muslims in free societies should go about their life without fear that they are being taught sedition against the society in which they live. Non-violent Muslims, I am sure, would accept to live within such a framework in which they are free to practice their religion in peace and harmony with their non-Muslim neighbors.

This template for harmonious living and mutual respect would make incidents like 9/11, 7/7, and Westgate Mall unthinkable sins in such a peaceful environment.

Perhaps then the meek really can inherit the world.

Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com

He is also the Special Consultant on Delegitimization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue Center at Netanya Academic College.