On the morning of April 17, suspected Islamic gunmen opened fire on St Francis High School, a Catholic school founded in 1842 in Lahore and long considered one of the finest schools in the city. One student and two security guards were injured and taken to hospital.

Although the motive behind the attack has yet to be established, Christian lawyer Sardar Mushtaq Gill said in a statement that this "new attack witnesses the deterioration of the situation of Christians in Pakistan and spreads even more fear."

A few weeks earlier, gunmen opened fire on a Christian church in Lahore.

Around mid-April, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia —who once wrote a letter to Barack Obama beseeching the president to reconsider his foreign policies which enable the persecution of Christians in Syria — spoke again of the threat of Christian extinction in the Mideast during a meeting with Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos. In the Russian Patriarch's own words:

I regularly get reports of horrible crimes that are committed there against Christians, especially in northern Iraq. I have visited those places and I remember that there were many churches and monasteries there. The city of Mosul alone had 45 churches. Now there is not a single one. The buildings have been destroyed. Four hundred churches have been destroyed in Syria... The presence of the Christian minority was a factor that, in a good sense, brought tolerance and good relations between Christians and Muslims... Now Christianity is the most persecuted religion. The same is happening in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Northern Africa. In some countries of Europe, too, people are prohibited from wearing crosses at work, citing the need for tolerance, do not use the word ‘Christmas’, do not call Easter – Easter, saying just winter holiday or spring holiday instead.

Islamic State members ravaged Mosul's oldest Christian cemetery near the Syrian Orthodox Cathedral and published pictures of the destroyed tombstones and desecrated crosses as proof of their pious efforts to eradicate all signs and symbols of Christian "paganism."

Several jihadi websites posted these pictures. Some include Islamic State members using sledgehammers to destroy gravestones and efface the crosses carved on them.

As usual, Islamic scriptures justifying the Islamic State's actions accompany these pictures.

Islamic assaults on Christian cemeteries is not an uncommon phenomenon. Read here about recent ones in Iran and Libya. Even in Germany, Muslims are demanding that Christian symbols and crosses at a cemetery be removed or covered up during Islamic funerals.

On Thursday, April 16, police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants hurled 12 Christians overboard during a recent crossing from Libya; another forty-one Christians were believed to have been drowned in a separate incident. The motive was that the victims "professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim." According to the Associated Press:

Palermo police said they had detained 15 people suspected in the high seas assault, which they learned of while interviewing tearful survivors from Nigeria and Ghana who had arrived in Palermo Wednesday morning after being rescued at sea by the ship Ellensborg. The 15 were accused of multiple homicide aggravated by religious hatred, police said in a statement. The survivors said they had boarded a rubber boat April 14 on the Libyan coast with 105 passengers aboard, part of the wave of migrants taking advantage of calm seas and warm weather to make the risky crossing from Libya, where most smuggling operations originate. During the crossing, the migrants from Nigeria and Ghana — believed to be Christians — were threatened with being abandoned at sea by some 15 other passengers from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea Bissau. Eventually the threat was carried out and 12 were pushed overboard. The statement said the motive was that the victims "professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim." The surviving Christians, the statement said, only managed to stay on board by forming a "human chain" to resist the assault...

Update: A new report says that the reason the Christians were thrown overboard is because a boy was seen praying to the Judeo-Christian God. Muslims commanded him to stop, saying "Here, we only pray to Allah." Eventually the Muslims "went mad," in the words of a witness, started screaming "Allahu Akbar," and began hurling Christians into the sea.