Saudi Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani, former Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and current prayer leader of Muhaisin Mosque in Riyadh, recently issued the following "tweet" on his personal Twitter account: "My beloved nation: It suffices me that you shelter me from hearing church bells ringing in you."

This is reminiscent of when another top ranking Saudi religious leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah declared in 2012 that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.”

The similarities don't end there. No mainstream media in the English language reported the 2012 anecdote till I did. And as of this moment, this anecdote concerning a leading Saudi cleric relishing the fact that no church bells can be heard in his nation is left completely unreported in Western media.

Would that be the case if, say, a top Vatican official declared that he longs for the day when all mosques are banned in Italy?

Perhaps more ironic, the MSM is acquainted with Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani. The New York Times, for instance, has an entire spread about him. The "happy" and "hopeful" theme is how al-Kalbani managed to rise to the top in Saudi Arabia — which is apparently "tolerant" — by becoming the first black Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

As for this business of boasting that, whatever his nation's shortcomings are, at least it shelters him from hearing those accursed church bells, not a peep anywhere.

According to Abdel Fattah Zarawi, the Muslim leader of the Salafi party, also known as the Free Front of Algeria, any and all Christian churches remaining in the north African nation must be closed and reopened as mosques.

Although the closure, destruction, or transformation of Christian churches into mosques is nearly as old as Islam itself — Algeria was Christian-majority when Islam invaded and conquered it in the seventh century — the Salafi leader tried to portray his proposal as a "reaction," or "grievance" against rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, especially France.

Launched on social media and networks, the Salafi campaign against Algerian churches even calls for the transformation of the nation's most important churches into mosques — including the Church of Notre Dame d'Afrique in Algiers, the Church of St. Augustine in Annaba, and the Church of Santa Cruz in Oran — since "they have no relation whatsoever to the religion of Algerian Muslims."

Due to their involvement in helping build churches for impoverished Christian communities in Pakistan, Javed David, head of Hope for the Light Ministries in Lahore, and his associates, have been receiving death threats since February of this year.

The latest incident occurred on April 4 (though it became public knowledge in May). According to David:

I had been to church in Sheikhupura to attend a meeting with colleagues. It was 8 o'clock in the evening when we left to return to Lahore. We were about to reach the main road when a motorbike drove up and blocked the way. Maybe they were following us. The two bikers were wearing a helmet. One of them came up to my window and spoke to me. "We know what you are doing here," he said. "Stop building churches. Convert to Islam, which is the true religion. Otherwise we will make a horrible example of you."

On February 22, a similar incident occurred after he visited another church under construction.

On that occasion too, I was going home when a motorcycle stopped in front of me. The driver knocked on the window and threw in a piece of paper. I did not open it before I got home. It said, 'This is an Islamic nation. We cannot allow church building. Either you convert to Islam or you leave this country! Stop building churches or you'll pay the consequences!"

Coptic Solidarity

Armed gunmen seized an 8-year-old Coptic Christian child from his mother’s arms. The child, Antonious Zaki Hani, was walking with his mother to school in Nag Hammadi, where he attended second grade.

Four armed gunmen appeared, forced the child from his mother’s hands under threat of death, and immediately fled in a car.

Since the “Arab Spring” came to Egypt, incidences of Coptic kidnaps have been on the rise.

In Nag Hammadi alone, 77 have been abducted, two of whom were killed.

A 900-year-old Christian church in Turkey is to be renovated into a functioning mosque—despite former governmental assurances that it would likely be renovated into a museum.

Foundations General Director Adnan Ertem argues that the building was a “sanctuary that was consecrated as a mosque…. It is a foundation that can be put into service in line with its foundational charter. Thus its function will be preserved.”

Enez’s Hagia Sophia, the name of the ancient church, is located inside the city of Ainos, along the border with Greece and stationed atop a hill, visible to all.

Another several-hundred-year-old church, Hagia Sophia in Trabzon along the Black Sea, although a museum for many years, was reopened in July 2013 as a mosque.

For many Muslims, the ultimate Islamic triumph will come when the primary Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (Constantinople), which is currently a museum, is transformed into a mosque—as Turkish leaders recently threatened when Pope Francis acknowledged the Armenian Genocide.

By Ralph H. Sidway, 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.

The recent Muslim jihad attack at a Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland Texas has generated strong reactions across the political spectrum. Four of us in my church recently had a fairly rigorous discussion of some of the issues involved, with two believing the cartoon contest needlessly provoked Muslim anger, and myself and one other siding with a strong commitment to freedom of speech/expression. You can’t escape this debate. It is literally everywhere, and will likely grow in significance in the days ahead.

Although there are many expected responses along partisan lines, there have been some surprises on both the conservative and liberal ends of the teeter-totter. For example, some Fox News personalities have openly blamed Pamela Geller, the “Draw Muhammad” event coordinator, for provoking the jihad attack. (Ms. Geller has written an articulate defense, which has been published as an op-ed by TIME, Inc.)

On the flip side, MSNBC’s “All In” host Chris Hayes, in a somewhat torturous apologetic, advocated for being provocative when it flushes out extremist would-be murderers:

My feeling, though, in the wake of this, is that there’s some part of me that feels that if the thing you’re worried about is doing an event that will provoke two people rolling up in body armor and automatic weapons trying to murder people, then it actually weirdly is important that you do that… I don’t care if it was a provocation, if what it’s provoking is attempted murder, because I want to live in a society that that is essentially not okay and not tolerated.

Ryan Mauro of The Clarion Project ably cuts through the fog of words surrounding the Garland Texas jihad attack:

The media's focus on the Mohammed drawings contest misses the mark. Whether or not one agrees with holding the event is irrelevant as to why this attack happened. It happened because of the desire to find a target; not because of the target itself.

Mauro is absolutely correct: when you’re a Muslim striving to follow as perfectly as possible the Koran and the example of Muhammad, the Dar-al-Harb is filled with targets. With ISIS commanding Muslims in America to wage jihad against non-Muslims, there will be some takers who will do just that.

For Americans and Western Europeans, cartoons of Muhammad seem to have become the flashpoint of the “clash of civilizations.” But for Christians living in the Islamic world, their very being is all the provocation Muslims need. Witness:

• ‘Arab Spring’ Muslim gangs go through buses in Cairo, Egypt checking the wrists of the passengers. Those with the cross tattooed on their wrists — a Coptic tradition — are summarily killed;
• 21 Coptic Christians in Libya are beheaded because they refuse to deny Jesus Christ and convert to Islam, or to pay the jizya;
• 30 Ethiopian Christians are shot or beheaded for refusing to deny Jesus Christ;
• The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia declares that all Christians must be expelled from the Arabian peninsula and all churches destroyed;
• 100 years after the Armenian Genocide (which taken in the larger context of Ottoman persecution saw 4 million Christians killed by their Muslim overlords and neighbors between 1894 and 1922) we are witnessing yet another Muslim genocide against Christians.

Christians themselves in the Islamic world are — by their very being, by their very presence — all the provocation Muslims need to slaughter them. No cartoons required.

Christians in the Islamic world cannot openly wear or make the Sign of the Cross without it provoking Muslims. They don’t even have to do that much, they just have to be breathing. And now with Muslim desecration of Christian grave sites, they don’t even have to be doing that.

When one has studied the phenomenon of Muslim attacks against non-Muslims for a while, one gets the sense that the term “provocation” is completely inaccurate and inappropriate. There is a better word which describes the Muslim pathology: “predisposition.”

The extent to which a Muslim grows in devout observance of Islam is the extent to which he/she is likely to follow more and more literally the commands in the Koran and the example of Muhammad. Devout observance leads to the predisposition to take action against non-Muslim targets which the Muslim believes offends his religion.

In Muslim majority nations, this predisposition becomes so intense that the mere presence of Christians or other non-Muslims cannot be tolerated at all. This very principle is clearly expressed in the Koran:

And fight them until there is no more fitnah (disbelief and polytheism: i.e. worshipping others besides Allah) and the religion (worship) will all be for Allah Alone. — Sura 8.39

Spirituality is often mixed with paradox. Most Westerners cannot understand that, and therefore cannot accept that the more devout a Muslim becomes, the more likely he is to become a jihadi.

It would seem that God is not without a sense of irony, for in the Islamic world, as we have seen this tsunami of Muslim genocidal persecution of Christians, we have also seen immensely powerful examples of heightened Christian faith.

Rather than leading Christians to fear, hatred and retaliation (though one can find some examples of those humanly understandable reactions also), the Muslim slaughter of Christians has provoked (there’s that word again) responses of absolutely Christ-like behavior, with Coptic, Iraqi, Nigerian and Niger Christians forgiving and praying for the Muslims who are killing their families. These examples are the very definition of true freedom: freedom from hatred, fear, and even death itself. Meanwhile, the Muslim jihadis are slaves of rage, bloodlust, and the example of their warlord prophet.

For those who can slow down their own reactive thought processes and ponder this dichotomy between the evil, murderous behavior of devout Muslims, and the prayerful, sacrificial and forgiving response of the Christians they are persecuting, it should be clear that one of these two paths is patently false, and the other is amazingly, shiningly true.

With this in mind, it then becomes sadly clear that the future will only bring more proofs of the falsehood of Islam, in the form of more murderous Muslim jihad attacks against all manner of “provocations.”

For the devout jihadi, the entire world is filled with targets. As with the Muslim persecution of Christians, no cartoons are needed.

On the same year that millions around the world commemorated the centennial of the Armenian Genocide—or, more fundamentally, the Christian Genocide—Turkish authorities have started the demolition of Kamp Armen, an Armenian orphanage. Armenian sources reported in early May that bulldozers have begun to demolish the building located in the metropolitan district of Tuzla, despite attempts by some political representatives of the opposition parties to intervene.

The orphanage was built in 1962 on the initiative of the Armenian Protestant community. Reports Agenzia Fides:

Thanks to its activities, the institution has helped 1,500 children to grow up in an environment based on the spirituality and culture of Armenian Christianity. There was also Hrant Dink among its students, the Armenian Turkish journalist, founder of the bilingual magazine Agos, killed in 2007 after being repeatedly threatened with death for his positions on the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish State had expropriated the orphanage in 1987, and all legal attempt by the Armenian Protestant communities to regain control of the building fell on deaf ears.