A few days ago in Sudan, an eight-month pregnant wife and mother was sentenced to death by hanging for refusing to renounce Christ and embrace Islam. According to the LA Times:

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, who has a young son and is married to a Christian from South Sudan, violated Islamic sharia law, the court said. She insists she was raised Christian, not Muslim. The court also ordered Ibrahim to be flogged for having sexual relations with her husband, since her marriage is not recognized by officials. Ibrahim refused a court order Sunday giving her several days to renounce her Christian faith, which resulted in the sentencing Thursday…. Ibrahim, currently jailed with her son, will be allowed to give birth and raise her second child until the age of 2 years but then faces execution. Sudanese authorities refuse to allow Ibrahim’s son to reside with her husband because the husband is Christian.

Tragic as this story is, it is also immensely commonplace in Islamic countries. Why? Because Islamic law does in fact punish the apostate from Islam—including with death—in accordance with the commands of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Indeed, many Muslim clerics believe that “If the [death] penalty for apostasy was ignored, there would not be an Islam today; Islam would have ended on the death of the prophet,” as top Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi once declared on live television.

Of more significance is the Amnesty International statement concerning Meriam Ibrahim’s plight. While its criticism is aimed at Sudan’s legal system, the statement unwittingly provides a glimpse of how the international community would view Islam if it could actually understand that these human rights abuses are not products of this or that government or regime, but of Islam itself.

According to the Amnesty International statement:

The fact that a woman has been sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion is appalling and abhorrent. Adultery and apostasy are acts which should not be considered crimes at all. It is flagrant breach of international human rights law. The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, which includes the freedom to hold beliefs, is far-reaching and profound; it encompasses freedom of thought on all matters, personal conviction and the commitment to religion or belief (emphasis added).

If, as Amnesty International declares, flogging and executing a person, in this case a pregnant woman, because of her “religious choice” and marrying a man of a “different religion” are “appalling and abhorrent”; if they are a “flagrant breach of international human rights law”—what do we make of the fact that Muslim converts to Christianity are punished and sometimes killed all across the Islamic world?

Consider the following anecdotes, a few examples, most from 2013 alone (culled from my monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians” series and listed in country alphabetical order):

Afghanistan: A member of Afghanistan’s Parliament said that all Afghans who convert to Christianity should be executed. His exact words: “Afghani citizens continue to convert to Christianity in India. Numerous Afghanis have become Christians in India. This is an offense to Islamic Laws and according to the Quran they need to be executed.” As one of many live examples, Said Musa, an amputee and father of six young children, was once charged with apostasy and pressured to renounce Christianity, but he refused. So he was imprisoned, suffering “sexual abuse, beatings, mockery, and sleep deprivation because of his faith in Jesus.”

Algeria: The wife of Ali Touahir, a 52-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity, left him, taking their seven-year-old daughter, and is divorcing him in court. One of his wife’s brothers openly threatened to kill apostate. The wife’s lawyer asserted: “It is not possible that my client [the Muslim wife] still remain under the same roof with a man who has renounced his religion, as he became apostate; and we are not ignorant of the punishment that is due an apostate under sharia [death].”

Cameroon: Two Muslim converts to Christianity were shot dead and two others wounded, in the Christian-majority African nation where Muslims make approximately 20 percent of the population. One of them was previously threatened by the Nigerian Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram to return to Islam or “face Allah’s wrath.”

Egypt: A court sentenced an entire family—Nadia Mohamed Ali and her seven children—to fifteen years in prison for converting to Christianity. A born Christian, Nadia had earlier converted to Islam and married a Muslim man; reconverting back to Christianity after the death of her husband, she attempted to reflect this change formally on her identity card and her children’s, which created suspicions among security, who arrested the family. Separately and days ago in Egypt, after a former Muslim woman on live television announced her apostasy and lack of faith in Muhammad as the “Messenger of Allah,” she was insulted, ridiculed, and thrown off the set by the host.

Iran: Imprisoned American pastor Saeed Abedini was reported as “facing physical and psychological torture at the hands of captors demanding he renounce his beliefs.” The 32-year-old married father of two, who left his home in Boise, Idaho, to help start an orphanage in his former country, once detailed “horrific pressures” and “death threats” in a letter to family members: “My eyes get blurry, my body does not have the strength to walk, and my steps become very weak and shaky… They are only waiting for one thing…for me to deny Christ. But they will never get this from me.” The imprisonment and torture of Muslim converts to Christianity in Iran is quite common (recall the plight of Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani). According to Adnkronos News, “renouncing the Muslim faith is punishable with the death penalty [in Iran]. Over 300 Iranian converts to Christianity have been arrested over the past two years, according to opposition websites.”

Kyrgyz: After a young Muslim girl converted to Christianity, her parents “wanted her to recant and renounce her faith in Christ, so they began to beat her systematically till she lost consciousness… It was winter when all of this happened, so her parents put her into a cold room and kept her there for several days. Still they were unable to break her spirit. They then started pulling her hair and put her face against the stove, burning her face. In spite of this, she remained faithful.”

Morocco: A fatwa, or Islamic decree, by the government’s top religious authority, calls for the execution of those Muslims who leave Islam, causing many Christian converts to live in fear. Lamented one Christian: “The fatwa showed us that our country is still living in the old centuries—no freedom, no democracy. Unfortunately, we feel that we aren’t protected. We can be arrested or now even killed any time and everywhere. The majority of the Christian Moroccan leaders have the same feeling. We are more followed now by the secret police than before. Only the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ gives us courage and peace.”

Pakistan: A 16-year-old Muslim boy who converted to Christianity was abducted in Peshawar by Taliban-linked Islamic militants “and his fate may already be marked, as he is considered ‘guilty of apostasy.’” As one Pakistani pastor explained, “If a young Muslim converts to Christianity in Pakistan, he is forced to live in hiding. Every Muslim might feel compelled to kill him. The change of religion is not punished by the civil law, it is punishable by Islamic law. For this reason cases of Muslim conversion to Christianity are very rare and some convert in secret.” Muhammad Kamran, a Muslim convert to Christianity, exemplifies the pastor’s words. After he told his wife of his conversion, she abused and exposed him, resulting in his being severely beaten by local Muslims. In his words: “No one was willing to let me live the life I wanted [as a Christian]—they say Islam is not a religion of compulsion, but no one has been able to tell me why Muslims who don’t find satisfaction in the religion [such as myself] become liable to be killed.”

Saudi Arabia: After a woman was exposed as having converted to Christianity, she was sentenced to six years in prison and 300 lashes. Although she managed to flee the nation and went into hiding, the Christian Lebanese man accused of introducing her to Christianity received six years in prison and 300 lashes.

Somalia: The Al-Qaeda linked Al Shabaab (“The Youth”), which has vowed to cleanse the Horn of Africa of all Christian presence, has slaughtered countless Muslim converts to Christianity—men, women, and children—in the last few years. Most recently, Al Shabaab shot to death 42-year-old Fartun Omar, a widow and mother of five, for converting to Christianity. Months earlier, they had killed her husband for the same “crime,” and had been hunting for the wife. In a separate incident, Al Shabaab publicly executed a 28-year-old man after determining that he had in fact become a Christian. Al Shabaab Muslims also seized Hassan Gulled, 25, for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity, and imprisoned him, and tortured him. According to local sources, “Al Shabaab have been torturing him to see whether he would deny his Christian faith. Since last week, no information has surfaced concerning Gulled. There is a possibility that he could have been killed.”

Tanzania: At the time pregnant and with three children, Lukia Khalid explained how when she told her Muslim husband that she had converted to Christianity, “He threatened to kill me if I was to stay with him. I then decided to escape that night with my three children to a neighbor’s house…. We left only with the clothes that we were wearing. The command was so urgent that we could not wait any longer. We had to leave immediately.” Last heard, they were living in destitute conditions.

One can go on and on with examples (see Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, pages 96-135, for a more thorough expose, including on the doctrine and history of apostasy in Islam, and dozens of more recent examples).

Returning to Meriam Ibrahim, the pregnant Sudanese mother set to be executed for refusing to recant Christ and embrace Islam, some questions and observations are in order:

Are all the other anecdotes listed above not equally “appalling and abhorrent”—to use Amnesty International’s words describing Meriam’s specific plight? Are they not all a “flagrant breach of international human rights law”?

If so, and if the international community is actually serious about putting a stop to them, should it not try to ascertain the true source behind them?

After all, considering that Muslim converts to Christianity are being attacked all throughout the Islamic world—including in nations as diverse as Algeria, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and Kyrgyz—surely the source is not something as simple as “Sudan’s legal system."

The fact is, Muslim converts to Christianity are even under attack in Europe. In Norway alone, for example, two Iranian converts out for a walk were stabbed with knives by masked men shouting “infidels!” One of the men stabbed had converted in Iran, was threatened there, and immigrated to Norway, thinking he could escape Islam’s apostasy penalty. Earlier, an Afghan convert to Christianity was scalded with boiling water and acid at a Norwegian refugee processing center: “If you do not return to Islam, we will kill you,” his attackers told him.

Of course, the true source for all these attacks on Muslim converts to Christianity—in nations that do not share race, language, culture, politics, or economics—is Islam itself. Anyone with common sense, anyone with the ability to be honest with oneself, must concede as much. There is no other reasonable way to explain such identical patterns of abuse in such a wide array of nations.

But so long as the international community and human rights organizations fail to employ some common sense and honesty—fail to call a spade a spade—so will they ensure that countless more innocent humans like Meriam Ibrahim continue to suffer “appalling and abhorrent” treatment, simply for trying to exercise their “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” under Islam.

• French

By Ralph H. Sidway

In Europe and America,

There’s a growing feeling of hysteria…

But what may save us, me and you,

Is if the [Muslims] love their children too.

Adapted from ‘Russians’, by Sting, 1984.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of Sting’s solo career with his critically acclaimed hit album, Dream Of The Blue Turtles. Included on this radical departure from the musical stylings of Sting’s former band, The Police, was the sobering meditation, Russians. (Complete lyrics here.)

Although I disagree with some of Sting’s political sensibilities (after all, Reagan won the Cold War), his use of a simple, rhetorical question was most compelling. (Of course, the Russians love their children!)

In any case, today, thirty years after Russians was released, we seem to have entered into a new phase of a different war, a very, very old war, with ominous clouds on the horizon.

Ours is a time of fitful contradictions and spasms of policy incoherence, as the United States, the UK, and the West vacillate between outright denial of the threat of Islam, and ill-advised alliances with the very forces seeking to destroy us. Sorely lacking is a clear-headed appraisal of and strategy to meet the mortal threat posed by a globally emboldened, militant Islam, which, after fourteen hundred years, is once again 100% determined to conquer us, through immigration, birth rates, lawfare, politics, stealth, and conversion when necessary, by terrorism wherever possible, and by open warfare whenever the odds are in their favor.

No doubt you’ve seen the projections: England will be a Muslim majority country in a couple of decades. Europe too. The growth of Muslim populations in major European cities has led to sharia “no-go zones,” where police seldom venture, and from where Muslim youths routinely riot over the slightest offense. Last Spring it was Sweden which burned. In 2005, the outskirts of Paris. This year (so far) it’s Denmark.

Generational Assimilation Among Western Muslims?

We were told that multiculturalism was the way of the future in England, Europe, Canada and America. That any mild inconveniences experienced because of new (Muslim) immigrants having difficulties adjusting to Western paradigms would smooth away as their children grew to maturity, adopting wholeheartedly the Western worldview of prosperity, freedom, tolerance and congeniality.

Rather, the reverse seems to be happening, as numerous reports indicate second and third generation Muslim immigrants are committing far more crimes (218% more in Denmark) and are far more inclined to join the global jihad in Syria than their supposedly less-acclimated parents. There are whole French and German-speaking units in ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the most bloodthirsty jihadist faction among the Syrian “rebels”) made up primarily of second and third generation descendants of Arab immigrants and Muslim converts.

In the Netherlands, 65% of Moroccan Muslim youths have been arrested by police, and a third of that group have been arrested five or more times.

There are reports, too, of whole Muslim families joining the jihad, as in the case of a British Muslim father who took his five sons across Europe and Turkey in order to wage jihad with them in Syria.

Problems Within Muslim Culture?

Doesn’t this reveal something about Islamic culture, the message being propagated via mosques, books, videos, and, of course, through core Islamic texts, including the Quran, the Hadiths and the Sira? Devotion to the example of Muhammad’s victories in battle, the all-important Muslim self-image of Islamic superiority over all other religions, supposedly proven by its conquering of the Byzantine Christian Empire in 1453 (celebrated annually by “secular” Turkey), coupled with disdain for the lax and soft European, British and American cultures, breeds contempt for the West and a sense of rightful entitlement.

And that’s just the West.

Media Watch Groups Report on Global Muslim Views

There are shocking video reports out of the Middle East of Palestinian, Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian TV programs and videos geared expressly towards children, which portrays Christians and Jews as sub-human, openly calling for their slaughter, and prepping Muslim children for suicide operations. A quick list of examples follows.

Syria —

• A Sunni Muslim sheikh called on children aged 5-12 to “slaughter all Christians for being infidels.”
• A child, prodded by the Free Syrian Army, cutting the heads off of Syrian men for apparently being loyal to the Assad government.
• The FSA making another child hack a man’s head off—again, to cries of Allahu Akbar.
• Young children in the town of Ras al-Ayn are shown playing “Behead the Enemy.”
• An early 2014 video by ISIS shows young children (under six years old), swearing allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and holding and cocking rifles.

Pakistan —

• A devout Muslim father handed over his three young sons to the leader of Jamaat-ut-Dawah (the parent Islamic organization behind Lashkar-e-Taiba, the jihadist group which committed the 2008 Mumbai massacres which killed 166 people), saying: “I hand over my three young sons to you for jihad (holy war). They will be now on your hands in your struggle.”

Hamas trains children and teens to be suicide martyrs, kill Jews —

• The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported earlier this year on Hamas training 13,000 teens to emulate Muslim “suicide martyrs.”
• Palestinian Media Watch reports on the Hamas children’s program Tomorrow’s Pioneers, with a child host teaching another child to “shoot all the Jews,” while a giant happy-faced bumblebee nods cheerfully.
• The Muslim “Mickey Mouse” teaches terrorism to Muslim kids. Per the news report:

After seeing how the Islamist terror group had appropriated her father’s work to encourage genocidal hatred, Diana Disney Miller – daughter of Walt Disney – voiced her disgust to the New York Daily News: ‘Indoctrinating children like this, teaching them to be evil. The world loves children and this is just going against the grain of humanity… What we’re dealing with here is pure evil’.

Egypt —

• A Muslim child preacher cites the infamous genocidal antisemitic hadith, calling for Muslim extermination of the Jewish people.
• Muslim children profess their eagerness to become martyrs through fighting the kuffar, or infidels.

Palestinian Authority —

• A Muslim mother lauds her three sons as “martyrs,” who were killed in attacks against civilians in Israel, and lamented that she did not have one hundred sons to die attacking Israelis.
• A UN-sponsored camp for Palestinian children, supported by U.S. tax dollars and supposedly neutral, teaches antisemitism, war, jihad and martyrdom to take back Palestine from “the Jews,” who are compared to wolves.

Lebanon —

• Hezbollah “indoctrinates youth with messages of hate and murder.”
• Hezbollah’s brainwashing includes everything from “songs praising martyrs to support for jihad-like movements and glorifications of death. The organization’s goal is clear: to inspire children to become terrorists.”

Dagestan —

In the Muslim homeland of the Boston Marathon jihad murderers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, children are imitating their parents by filming their own jihad videos.

The Global Muslim Village: “Unborn Martyrs” Being Prepared to Wage Jihad

Hillary Clinton famously wrote, “It takes a village,” yet there seems to be a significant and growing movement within the global Muslim village, which raises its children on a steady diet of hatred of non-Muslims coupled with an eagerness to “slay and be slain” (Quran 9:111), so as to gain Allah’s favor and inherit paradise. This Islamic indoctrination into a culture of death and murder begins in utero, as seen in this video example from the 2012 Muslim Day Parade in New York City, where one woman, an official speaker for the event, exclaimed “We have the unborn martyrs in our wombs.”

FGM, Child Marriage, and Honor Killings

These are merely some representative examples of the impetus to jihad, death and murder in Islamic culture. Time and space do not allow us to cite the pervasive Muslim practices of female genital mutilation, child marriage, and honor killings, all codified in Islamic scriptures and law.

The situation of Muslim girls is perhaps the most dire of any segment of the global population, with the probable exception of Christian girls in Islamic countries such as Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and Nigeria, where incidents of rape, abductions for ransom, and forced conversions are widespread.

The Same Biology?

Sting’s repeating thought in Russians is the secular/scientific call for peace:

We share the same biology

Regardless of ideology...

Clever rhyme, which both Christian and atheist could find at least some solace in. Religious or secular, one can pretty much acknowledge the innate human impulse to life, to live life, and to wish to hand down to one’s children the opportunity to live their life, and enable the same for others. America is founded on the belief that all people are entitled to “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Yet it seems there is a frighteningly powerful counter-impulse permeating and afflicting the Muslim world. In Islam, death has both practical purpose and divine sanction. The life of a non-Muslim is not sacred, as elaborate religious laws make clear in prescribing penalties for murder. And there is no penalty for a parent, grandparent, sibling or close relative for the killing of a Muslim woman or child who is perceived as bringing shame upon the family (the Muslim phenomenon of honor killings). Similarly, a Muslim apostate may be killed by any member of the umma without penalty; they are discharging Allah’s judgment.

The indoctrination of each successive generation of children in Muslim cultures to hate the infidel, prepare for warfare, bloodshed, murder and suicide missions, offers little hope for the world. To an indoctrinated Muslim, the kuffar are unclean, even sub-human. We only “share the same biology” if we embrace the Islamic ideology. Biology alone is not a universal standard in Islam.

Do the Muslims love their children too?

Perhaps I’m not alone in approaching this question in a non-rhetorical manner. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently dared to tackle the subject quite a bit more directly (albeit without mentioning children), urging an international alliance against Islamism, and defining it as “the greatest threat facing the world today.”

But could an alliance of non-Muslim nations expect to roll back fourteen centuries of entrenched Islamic culture based on unalterable sacred scripture, which makes hatred of the infidel and the slaughter of Christians and Jews permissible, even obligatory?

As we ponder the failure of the West to assimilate and rehabilitate second and third generation Muslim immigrants, as they riot and become career criminals at home, or run off to join the jihad in Syria or wherever, breathlessly eager to bring the jihad back to America, Canada, Britain and Europe to advance the worldwide caliphate, the answer to Sting’s once rhetorical question seems neither pleasant nor hopeful.

But what may save us, me and you,

Is if the Muslims love their children too.

Whether the Muslims love their children or not may be a secondary question. Perhaps the more important question is the one we must ask of ourselves:

But what may save us, in the end,

Is if we love our children,

enough to defend.