Killing Christians
ETZIONI, AMITAI
Killing Christians The underreported story of Islamist violence around the world. BY AMITAI ETZIONI ON OCTOBER 17, bombs killed 6 people and wounded 143 in Zamboanga, the Philippines. While...
...Indeed, Christians in other parts Amitai Etzioni is a university professor at George Washington University and the author of The New Golden Rule...
...And the media almost never point out that christians are being killed, often at places of worship, in several countries with Islamic majorities or governments, not because they are Westerners or Americans (many are neither) but because they are Christians...
...While Muslim societies differ widely in their levels of tolerance, pluralism, and religious freedom, full respect for Christianity is virtually absent...
...During his presentation, Ebrahim Moosa, an imam from South Africa now teaching at Duke University, urged that Islam be recast so as to accommodate liberal attitudes...
...An elderly Afghan freed from detention at Guantanamo last week made a telling statement to a Washington Post reporter: "The Americans treated me well, but they were not Muslims, so I didn't like them...
...In the modern period, Christians and Jews are typically called Kuffr, or infidels...
...of Indonesia have hardly fared better...
...On September 25, militant Muslims shot dead 7 christian Pakistanis execution style in Karachi...
...But few realize that it was a religious war—between Muslim Eritrea and Christian Ethiopia—in which tens of thousands perished...
...But we are still waiting to hear from many other Muslim leaders as to whether they wish to move Islam in this direction...
...Most of the media failed to report this at all, though it was at least the fifth bloody attack on christians in Pakistan in the last twelve months...
...several churches were burned in Kenya the following year...
...for instance, thousands died during riots in the Moluccan Islands in 2000...
...And it is possible that moderate interpretations of Islam may again come to predominate...
...People who follow international news are aware that a civil war raged in Ethiopia for more than 30 years...
...The former were "people of the book...
...toleration of capitalism...
...The bloody war in the Sudan, similarly, pits the Muslim government in the North against the Christian and animist South...
...What is going on here...
...and recognition of the full dignity and humanity of nonbelievers...
...And in Nigeria, as Muslims try to impose a strict version of the legal code called sharia in several provinces, armed conflicts between Muslims and Christians have erupted and thousands have died...
...It is true that other religions have passed through violent and intolerant phases...
...From the beginning, Islam drew a distinction between Christians and Jews and other non-Muslims...
...The gathering brought together a number of Islamic and Western intellectuals in opposition to the thesis advanced by Samuel Hunt-ington of Harvard University that Western and Islamic civilizations are bound to clash...
...It seems somehow inflammatory to point to the religious element of these and many other conflicts...
...On a smaller scale but very much along the same lines, scores of Coptic Christians were killed in Egypt in January 2000...
...When Christians and Jews are no longer characterized as Kuffr, we shall know we have turned a corner...
...Nor is the White House or Congress nearly as attentive—to put it mildly—to this pattern of killing as it is to any injury on either side of the conflict in Israel...
...Nearly every day, meanwhile, some scholar assures us that Islam is a peaceable and loving religion...
...He stressed the need for three changes: recognition of women's equality with men...
...Just lately, in the Ivory Coast, Muslims in the North have been attacking Christians in the South...
...While press accounts mentioned in passing that the victims were christians, few conveyed to the reader that these were people assaulted by Muslim extremists because of their religion...
...In countries under strict sharia, apostasy is a capital crime, and in the minds of extremists like Osama bin Laden, infidels too deserve death...
...They had to pay special taxes and wear identifying clothing, yet their status reflected a certain respect for what Muslims saw as the earlier but incomplete and corrupted revelation recorded in the Bible...
...This matter came up last spring at a conference held by Iranian reformers in Isfahan...
...The White House has solid tactical reasons for stating and restating that our fight is only with terrorists, not Muslims...
...Many know that the people of East Timor were savaged, but it is rarely mentioned that most East Timorese are Christian, while the Indonesian militants who killed many of them and brutalized the refugees in West Timor are Muslim...
...But we shall be unable to recognize and foster that development if we refuse to acknowledge that the violence currently erupting in many parts of the Islamic world is aimed not simply at the political and economic leadership of the West but also at its Judeo-Christ-ian tradition...
...We must face the fact, however, that while the prophet has many moderate followers, the terrorists command great sympathy in the Islamic world not only because Islamic populations are anti-American or anti-Western, but also because the terrorists are attacking infidels...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 9
