By Ralph Sidway, guest contributor

For Orthodox and Coptic Christians, Easter falls on May 5 this year. That means we celebrate Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem on Sunday, April 28, and the whole following week, called Holy Week or Passion Week, leads to Jesus’ crucifixion, death and burial. Without minimizing or shying away from Christ's horrific sufferings, the Orthodox services offer poetically beautiful and moving hymns in praise of Christ and the means of His sacrifice for our salvation: the "Precious and Life-Giving Cross."

For some profound reflections on the Cross, you may wish to go here or here. (There are of course many superb resources on numerous Orthodox websites.) What I would like to concentrate on instead is the practice of Crucifixion itself.

In one of the meditations on the Cross linked to above, the author provides this excerpt from Martin Hengel's book, Crucifixion:

Crucifixion satisfied the primitive lust for revenge and the sadistic cruelty of individual rulers and of the masses. It was usually associated with other forms of torture, including at least flogging. At relatively small expense and to great public effect the criminal could be tortured to death for days in an unspeakable way. Crucifixion is thus a specific expression of the inhumanity dormant within men which these days is expressed, for example, in the call for the death penalty, for popular justice and for harsher treatment of criminals, as an expression of retribution. It is a manifestation of trans-subjective evil,a form of execution which manifests the demonic character of human cruelty and bestiality. (p. 87)

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn't been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, "fitna," which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur'an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur'an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is "shirk," the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

And fight them until there is no fitna and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah. And if they cease – then indeed, Allah is Seeing of what they do. (Qur'an 8:39)

In one of the authorized hadiths, Muhammad himself said:

“I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah” (Sahih Muslim 30).

Obviously, if Muslims take these open-ended commands from the Qur'an and the hadiths seriously, their fight against fitna — and against Christians — could go on for a very long time indeed. It certainly seems to be increasing in intensity, as attested by reports from Islamic countries, some highlights of which are referenced below.

Sometimes, the zealous Islamists get a little too excited, and have a hard time prioritizing between crucifixion and beheading, one of Islam's other favorite forms of execution, as in this recent story out of Saudi Arabia, where a man convicted of murder was beheaded first, then crucified. Obviously, he didn't suffer from the crucifixion at all. Perhaps it was done as a crime deterrent.

Lately, the Saudis seem to be showing signs of restraint and moderation, having recently delayed the executions of seven men sentenced to death by crucifixion.

In August and September 2012, reports from multiple media agencies in Egypt pointed to Muslim Brotherhood operatives crucifying opponents of Egypt's MB president Muhammad Morsi. There were charges of "hoax" which were repudiated by Raymond Ibrahim, who also cited video footage of an Islamic crucifixion of a man in Yemen.

In 2008, reports out of Iraq of atrocities committed against Christians included accounts of children as young as 10 years old being crucified.

Nomikos Michael Vaporis, in his landmark book, Witnesses For Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860, includes crucifixion as one of the many forms of execution used by the Muslim Turks, although most martyrdoms during the Ottoman oppression seem to have been performed by beheadings.

The horrific black and white image below is of a row of at least eight Armenians crucified during the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Muslim Turks.

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem. From a wealthy banking family, she was just one of thousands of Armenian girls to suffer a similar fate. Many were eventually killed and discarded. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 girls crucified, vultures eating their corpses. "Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands," Mardiganian wrote. "Only their hair blown by the wind covered their bodies."

I could go on and on with photos, citations and links, but you get the idea: Islam shows remarkable continuity and consistency throughout its history.

At this point I believe it is worth repeating portions of the quote from Martin Hengel's book, Crucifixion:

Crucifixion satisfied the primitive lust for revenge and the sadistic cruelty of individual rulers and of the masses... Crucifixion is thus a specific expression of the inhumanity dormant within men… It is a manifestation of... evil, a form of execution which manifests the demonic character of human cruelty and bestiality. (p. 87)

For emphasis, let's look at this in list form:

• primitive,
• lust for revenge,
• sadistic,
• cruel,
• inhuman,
• evil,
• demonic,
• bestial.

Yet crucifixion is one of the top two explicit forms of execution mandated in the holy book of Islam, the Qur'an itself, as well as in the life and words of Muhammad. And this is being mandated and practiced increasingly today both by official courts in Islamic countries, as well as by Muslim mobs in Egypt and elsewhere.

And our government is sending our taxpayer dollars to the people who perform these atrocities.

The persecuted Christians in the Islamic world, as they prepare to commemorate the Crucifixion of their Lord Jesus Christ, must feel, in their heart of hearts, as if they are ascending their own Golgotha. Like Jesus, they may also feel abandoned and terribly alone.

President Obama may not have personally ordered their crucifixions like Pontius Pilate did in his day, but by shoveling more and more aid to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, the Syrian Jihadi Rebels, Al Qaeda in Libya, and assorted other Islamist groups, Obama shows himself to be the Great Enabler of a Christian Genocide unfolding before our very eyes:

“And seeing he could not prevail, but that a tumult was rising, [Obama] took water and washed his hands before the [Islamic countries] saying, “I am innocent of the blood of [these people], you see to it.” And the [Muslims] answered and said, “[Their] blood be on us and on our children!” (Adapted from Matthew 27:24-25)

Let us pray there is a resurrection to follow this time of darkness we are living through.

Ralph Sidway is an Orthodox Christian researcher and writer, and author of Facing Islam: What the Ancient Church has to say about the Religion of Muhammad. He operates the Facing Islam blog.

Originally published by Gatestone Institute

What really happened on Sunday, April 7, 2013, during the St. Mark Cathedral attack in Cairo, where two Christians were killed and dozens wounded by Egyptian forces? As usual, different reports gave different versions, but now that the smoke has settled, the truth as first asserted during the attack by Coptic activists has been confirmed.

Back during the conflict, when state security was actually besieging the St. Mark cathedral—the most sacred building for millions of Coptic Christians and the only apostolic see serving the entire continent of Africa—Amir Ramzi, a Coptic man who managed to escape the compound where hundreds of other Copts were trapped all night was interviewed by phone on the popular Egyptian show, Cairo Today.

According Ramzi, president of the criminal court, “Today we witnessed a day unprecedented in the history of modern Egypt, a day when holy sites are attacked both by the interior ministry and the mob.”

The program’s host, Amr Adib, asked him to back up, evidently finding it difficult to implicate the interior ministry in an attack on an Egyptian landmark. So Ramzi began from the beginning, explaining how after the funeral service for another six Christians killed the day earlier—including one intentionally set aflame—in a conflict that started by Muslims sexually harassing a Christian girl, many of the Copts coming out of the cathedral were angry and protesting. Waiting for them in the streets were Islamic extremists, who began hurling rocks on the Copts, who responded in like manner. Eventually police appeared; Ramzi himself called a police chief, who assured him that the Copts should just go back into their cathedral, until the police secure the situation:

So that’s what we did, thinking police would come to protect and separate the clashers. We were surprised to find that the police began to intervene and become another party to the conflict, attacking the Copts who were fighting back against the [Muslim] youth who were attacking them, and shooting gas bombs into the cathedral compound, which caused extreme poisoning, to the point that the ambulance cars were not enough to take the sick.

Ramzi added that three to four gas bombs struck the papal headquarter itself—the seat of the Coptic pope—while another 40 to 50 entered into the general compound, causing dozens of Copts, including many women and children, to grow sick and/or faint. Whether from the gas bombs themselves or from another source, Copts also found the ceiling of their cathedral catching fire, though their youth managed to put it out.

He further confirmed that live ammunition was fired on the Copts who refused to relent and fought back fiercely, primarily with rocks. When Ramzi tried to get them to cool down, they told him that they “were ready to be martyred for our most important church” and “We’re not just children to abandon our cathedral to be set aflame or have someone attack it.”

Ramzi said that he could not really blame these Christian defenders, adding that many of them were already in heavy mourning for the six Copts murdered the day earlier, and, with a second attack on their cathedral for the funeral of these same deceased, had reached a point beyond frustration.

But Ramzi’s most important and (at the time) controversial assertion was the role played by Egypt’s Interior Ministry. Among other things, police and security figures would tell the beleaguered Copts everything is okay, that matters were secured, “only to find another five gas bombs thrown their way, not to mention live ammunition fired at them.” Similarly, He said that security kept circling the cathedral, shooting gas bombs at every door: “Why, why would they do this”? Ramzi implored on the phone. When he and others contacted police, urging them to bring an armored vehicle in front of the cathedral to guard it, it came. But far from protecting the cathedral, he personally saw “the [Muslim] youth” standing atop it, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the cathedral.

When the host continued to express dismay, and even doubt, that state security would really behave this way, the eyewitness articulated an important question: the one thing that everyone agreed to is that, for hours, there were at least 30-40 Muslim youth hurling projectiles and Molotov cocktails at the cathedral, “so can you tell me why security didn’t stop them or apprehend them? Was Egypt’s entire state security unable to stop a mere 30-40 youth from vandalizing the nation’s cathedral?”

When the host said, “but they arrested some ten people,” Ramzi scoffed: “What are you thinking? You’ll find that the majority of them are Christian.”

Time has proven all of Ramzi’s eyewitness assertions true. Soon after his interview, which was conducted even as the cathedral was still under siege, several pictures were published, including by Youm7, a prominent Egyptian paper, showing Muslims shooting rifles and throwing rocks and other projectiles at the cathedral, while security forces stand by. One picture shows a masked man in civilian clothes sitting in an Egyptian armored vehicle. Even the Western mainstream media recently came around to affirming that Egyptian security forces were involved in the attack on the cathedral. And, true to Ramzi’s prediction, the only people to be arrested in connection with this latest atrocity against Christianity were Christians themselves—for daring to protect their holiest site against an Islamic attack.