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Prominent indicators confirm that the U.S. is the chief facilitator of the persecution of Christians around the world today.

According to the recently released 2014 World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted, Syria is the third worst nation in the world in which to be Christian, Iraq is fourth, Afghanistan fifth, and Libya 13th. All four countries receive the strongest designation, “extreme persecution” (other designations are “severe,” “moderate,” and “sparse” persecution).

Aside from being so closely and harshly ranked, these four nations have something else in common: heavy U.S. involvement. Three—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya—were “liberated” thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring “freedom fighters” against the regime, many of whom would be better labeled “terrorists.”

The Syrian situation alone indicts U.S. foreign policy. According to Reuters:

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 “martyr” killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said. “This is a very minimal count based on what has been reported in the media and we can confirm,” said Frans Veerman, head of research for Open Doors. Estimates by other Christian groups put the annual figure as high as 8,000.

While most Americans are shielded from the true nature of the war by the U.S. media’s reluctance to report on it, Arabic media, websites, and activists daily report and document atrocity after atrocity—beheadings and bombed churches, Christians slaughtered for refusing to convert to Islam, and countless abducted for ransom or rape—at the hands of those whom the U.S. supports.

It’s enough to point out that “the largest massacre of Christians in Syria,” to quote a top religious leader, was left wholly unreported by any major U.S. news network.

At any rate, the statistics speak for themselves: Syria, which used to be religiously tolerant, is now, in the context of the United States’ trying to bring “democracy” to it, the third worst country in the world in terms of “extreme persecution” of Christians.

The Blaze reports that Dr. David Curry, president of Open Doors,

charged that the Obama administration has essentially declined to make the protection of religious minorities a priority . . . “There are many instances where the vacuum of leadership and spokesmanship has created a real problem,” said the human rights leader. “I would say that every significant data point on this year’s ‘2014 Watch List’ is worse—and I think a factor in it is a lack of leadership from Western governments including . . . the U.S. in terms of religious freedom.”

But it’s worse than that. Far from taking any action or providing leadership—or simply ceasing to support the terrorists responsible—the Obama administration recently tried to go to war with Syria on behalf of the “freedom fighters,” amazingly, in the name of “human rights” (Apparently the unsubstantiated rumor that Assad massacred people is enough for the U.S. to go to war, but the ongoing and well-documented massacres of Christians and other civilians at the hands of the opposition is not enough for the U.S. to stop supporting them.)

What’s worse, even the most misinformed mainstream-media-watching American today knows that the so-called “Arab Spring,” which was hailed to justify U.S. support for “rebels” of all stripes—in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (which months ago destroyed some 80 churches); in Libya, al-Qaeda, which has turned Benghazi into a terror zone; and now the “freedom fighters” in Syria—is not what it was touted to be.

In other words, at this point, whenever the U.S. intervenes in an Islamic nation, Islamists come to power. This is well demonstrated by the other three nations to which the U.S. brought “democracy” and where Christian minorities suffer “extreme persecution”:

• Afghanistan: The supposedly “moderate” Karzai government installed by the U.S. upholds many of the draconian laws enforced by the Taliban—including the apostasy law, fiercely persecuting those who seek to convert to Christianity—and, in 2011, under U.S. auspices, it destroyed Afghanistan’s last Christian church.
• Iraq: After the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, Christian minorities were savagely attacked and slaughtered, and dozens of their churches were bombed (see here for graphic images). Christians have been terrorized into near-extinction, with well over half of them fleeing Iraq.
• Libya: Ever since U.S.-backed, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists overthrew Qaddafi, Christians—including Americans—have indeed suffered extreme persecution. Churches have been bombed; Christians have been tortured and killed (including for refusing to convert); and nuns have been threatened.

Surely a common theme emerges here: Where the U.S. works to oust secular autocrats, the quality of life for Christians and other minorities takes a major nosedive. Under Saddam, Qaddafi, and Assad, Christians and their churches were largely protected.

Moreover, while George W. Bush was responsible for Afghanistan and Iraq, the argument can be made that, back then (2001 and 2003), this pattern of Islamic radicalization that erupts once autocrats are gone was less well known than it is today. There weren’t many precedents.

Conversely, the Obama administration has had both Afghanistan and Iraq to learn from—and yet still it supports Islamists and jihadis. But by now, what happens once they assume power—religious persecution, terror, oppression—is no longer a secret.

Incidentally, those who care little for the fate of Christians or other minorities in the Islamic world would do well to remember a simple truism: Wherever anti-Christian elements come to power, anti-American forces come to power. The two are synonymous.

Put differently, Muslim persecution of Christians is the litmus test of how radical an Islamic society has become. In all those Muslim nations that the U.S. has interfered in—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt (till the Egyptians revolted, to the chastisement of the U.S.), and now Syria—the increase of religious intolerance is a reflection of the empowerment of forces hostile to Western civilization.

I am often asked, “How can we help persecuted Christians?” At this point, one must respond: “How about starting with getting the U.S. government to stop being the chief facilitator of Christian persecution?” Altruism aside, it would be in the interests of all who value freedom, religious or otherwise—and especially their descendants.

From the Jerusalem Post

by Ariel Ben Solomon

01/19/2014 21:13

The majority of anti-Christian persecution in the world in 2013 took place at the hands of Muslims, according to a list by Open Doors USA.

The nondenominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide recently released its 2014 World Watch List, which describes and ranks anti-Christian persecution in a list of the 50 worst countries for 2013. It reported increasing violence against Christians in Africa, and said radical Muslims were the main source of persecution in 36 countries on its list – both in Islamic countries and in non-Muslim countries such as Kenya (ranked 40th), Ethiopia (17th) and Tanzania (49th). The top country where Christians suffer, for the 12th consecutive year, remains communist North Korea, though the nine following countries in the top ten are Islamic: Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Pakistan, Iran and Yemen. Open Doors said earlier this month that it had documented 2,123 “martyr” killings over the year, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said. Christianity is the largest and most widely spread faith in the world, with 2.2 billion followers, or 32 percent of the world population, according to a survey by the US-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “The one glaring fact that emerges from this report,” American-born scholar Raymond Ibrahim said in his analysis of the statistics on the Christian Broadcasting Network News website, “is that the overwhelming majority of Christian persecution around the world today is being committed at the hands of Muslims of all races, languages, cultures and socio-political circumstances: Muslims from among America’s allies (Saudi Arabia) and its enemies (Iran); Muslims from economically rich nations (Qatar) and from poor nations (Somalia and Yemen); Muslims from ‘Islamic republic’ nations (Afghanistan) and from ‘moderate’ nations (Malaysia and Indonesia); [and] Muslims from nations rescued by America (Kuwait).” Ibrahim, the son of Coptic Christian Egyptian parents, is a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum and author of a new book, titled Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, that documents the suffering of Christians in the region. He said that in contrast to the persecution in Muslim states, Christian suffering in North Korea was likely temporary, and would end with the regime’s fall just as religious persecution did after the fall of the communist Soviet Union. In Islamic countries, he said, the opposite tends to be the case. He noted that in countries that underwent “Arab Spring” uprisings, increased persecution occurred after the regimes collapsed. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and in places where the Syrian regime has lost power, Christian suffering has increased, he said. “Muslim persecution of Christians,” Ibrahim said, is “part of a continuum that started nearly 14 centuries ago.” Reuters contributed to this report.

By Enza Ferreri

The issue of taqiyya – the religious permission, indeed virtue, of Muslim deception to infidels for the good of Islam – is such a uniquely crucial aspect of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially, like in the West, when the former are a minority and the latter a majority, that there have been at least a couple of trials in Europe revolving around it, one recent and the other current.

In May 2013 there was a legal case in Italy in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khalid Chaouki, a Moroccan Muslim immigrant to Italy and now MP, sued another Moroccan immigrant, Souad Sbai, a woman journalist and former Italian MP who had accused him of practicing taqiyya when he was saying that he had renounced the Brotherhood while in fact he still 'shared its goals and ideas of dangerous, extreme Islam'. He lost the case.

In Britain, in the last few days of 2013 Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the newly-formed Liberty GB, an outspoken counterjihad, pro-Western and Christian civilisation party, got into trouble.

I have to declare an interest in the matter since I am the party's Press Officer. Liberty GB has some similarities to Holland's Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, although in no way, having started as recently as March 2013, it's as yet so popular. We are running in the coming elections for the European Parliament in May.

Tim Burton has been charged by the Police with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets and is soon due to appear in court.

At this point I must introduce the individual he tweeted about, a prominent albeit colourful Muslim whom Tim called 'a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist' on Twitter. He is Fiyaz Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), an organisation that acts like a sort of helpline for the victims of 'Islamophobia' and in so doing monitors the entity of what it must consider a grave social problem.

If you are looking for a balanced assessment of the impact of Muslim crime, violence, stealth jihad and terrorism on British society you will not find it on Tell MAMA's literature or website. But you'll see plenty of examples of 'hate' towards Muslims, a great number of which in the form of films, books, political campaigns and, of course, 'cyber harassment', 'cyber bullying', ‘cyber abuse’, ‘cyber incitement’, ‘cyber threats’, ‘cyber stalking’, or ‘cyber hate’ – which is what got Tim in a legal jam.

Tell MAMA and the other organisation founded by Mr Mujhal, Faith Matters, had been successful in their demand that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country.

The group has a Working Definition of Anti-Muslim Prejudice that includes 'insults or attacks against Islam', of which it's safe to assume well-documented criticisms will be seen as examples. It is also good at crafting new expressions like 'Anti-Muslim Cultural Racism', which is Liberty GB's sin in Tell MAMA's eyes, as it describes us as 'guilty of racialising Muslims'. How somebody can achieve such a feat is anyones's guess.

In its ardour to chastise Liberty GB, Tell MAMA says something which goes beyond matters of opinion and is factually wrong: 'Halal slaughter and meat would also be banned (but no mention of kosher)'. We do object to kosher too and we say it clearly.

What prompted Tim Burton to label Mr Mujhal on Twitter "a mendacious grievance-mongering taqqiyya-artist" and "a lying Muslim scumbag" were some revelations appeared in The Daily Telegraph. In the wake of the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street by two jihadists crying “Allahu Akbar” and giving the Quran as their motive in May of last year, Mr Mujhal in June reported

“a wave of attacks, harassment, and hate-filled speech against Muslims … an unprecedented number of incidents”, including “a rise in street harassment of Muslims – unprovoked, opportunistic attacks from strangers as Muslims go about their lives”. He added: “Over the past week or so, these sorts of hate crimes have noticeably increased in number and, in many instances, become more extreme. "The scale of the backlash is astounding … there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice. A sense of endemic fear has gripped Muslim communities.” The media, especially the BBC, have accepted the claims without question. A presenter on Radio 4’s influential Today programme stated that attacks on Muslims were now “on a very serious scale”. Talk of a “massive anti-Muslim backlash” has become routine. And it is that figure issued by Tell Mama – of, to date, 212 “anti-Muslim incidents” since the Woolwich murder – which has formed the basis of nearly all this reporting.

But when journalist Andrew Gilligan investigated a bit further, it turned out that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity occurring just online, like postings on Twitter and Facebook, a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified and not all the online abuse even originated in Britain.

Contrary to Tell MAMA's claims of a climate of violence, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment.

The organisation has received a total of £375,000 from the UK government. But as a consequence of these revelations and even previous discoveries of discrepancies between its figures and police official figures – showing Tell MAMA's inflated rates of and increase in anti-Muslim crimes – it had its public funding discontinued.

This hasn't stopped its activity, though:

Mujhal asserted that tougher sentences were needed to tackle Islamophobic crime, noting that the guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were "not fit for purpose". "They raised the bar of prosecution significantly. "Now unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality. "We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig's head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence.

Perhaps the lawsuit against Tim Burton is part of this campaign which seems apparently to target in particular social media.

Liberty GB is trying to make taqiyya the keystone of this trial. Given the special position of taqiyya in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially in non-Muslim-majority countries, if we, by making this case public, manage to make the British and Western people understand the meaning and nature of taqiyya, we will have managed to make them understand the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it.

The Western public has been misled about Islam and believes that the ‘religion of peace’ is fundamentally similar to Christianity in its ethical outlook. Replace God with Allah, Jesus with Muhammad, and you still have the same moral commandments: love your enemies, be benevolent towards non-Muslims, and thou shall not lie or give false testimony. If the authority of a court can establish that taqiyyawas indeed practised, Westerners can start to see that lying to them is not only allowed but encouraged by Islam as one of the means of submitting them to it, which is the final goal. As a consequence of this, people in the West may gradually become more and more reluctant to accept everything that Muslims say about Islam and may begin to doubt all the distortions they are currently fed.

One issue that we intend to bring to public attention is this: how can a Muslim's swearing on the Quran in court be accepted as declaration of the truthfulness of his testimony when the very book he is swearing on gives him divine permission to lie?