You are missing the point.
Of course it would be considered offensive.
But I don't think Christians would riot,burn Muslim places of worship or kill any Muslim religious leaders.
i think the analgy is fucking stupid because the images/icons of Jesus and of Muhammed are not valued or treated the same by each religion. its a nonsensical comparison
maybe if you compared it to abortion or another key aspect to christianity then maybe you're on to something. Werent there murders of abortion-praticitioners in the UK and US?? by catholics AND protestants?
Are Christians getting reamed up the a$$ by an oppressive world superpower?
hmm
Christians living in predominantly Muslim countries sure aren't being treated very well. By the way, where do you live, Roland? I'm sure you don't live within an oppressive superpower...you're far too bright for that. So, where?
Are Christians getting reamed up the a$$ by an oppressive world superpower?
hmm
Summing up muslims in general as fanatics and/or terrorists is incredibly stupid. But dismissing that poverty and the difficult contextual politics in some middle eastern countries does help stir fanatism in these countries seems to me like voluntary blindness.
Christians living in predominantly Muslim countries sure aren't being treated very well. By the way, where do you live, Roland? I'm sure you don't live within an oppressive superpower...you're far too bright for that. So, where?
Again, you are making up stuff and deviating away from facts...
Christmas in Iran...look at the christians just being tortured.
Christians living in predominantly Muslim countries sure aren't being treated very well. By the way, where do you live, Roland? I'm sure you don't live within an oppressive superpower...you're far too bright for that. So, where?
Change has to come from within...
Progress is not made by everyone joining some new fad,
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
Since, I'm extremely logical...I wish I had the time to educate and inform all the nuts on this board, but unfortunately I do have my own work that needs to be done.
I told you what drives them to such extremes.....a radical interpretation of Islam, which states that believers should kill all non-believers. I believe Mr. Van Gogh paid the ultimate price as a result of this fanaticism.
Although Christians represent less than 5% of the total Iraqi population, they make up 40% of the refugees now living in nearby countries, according to UNHCR.Northern Iraq remained predominantly Christian until the destructions of Tamerlane at the end of the 14th century. The Church of the East has its origin in what is now South East Turkey. By the end of the 13th century there were twelve Nestorian dioceses in a strip from Peking to Samarkand. When the 14th-century Muslim warlord of Turco-Mongol descent, Tamerlane (Timul Lenk), conquered Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. Timur Lenk had 70,000 Assyrian Christians beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad.
In the 16th century, Christians were half the population of Iraq.[16] In 1987, the last Iraqi census counted 1.4 million Christians.[17] They were tolerated under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, who even made one of them, Tariq Aziz, his deputy. Recently, Christians have seen their total numbers slump to about 500,000 today, of whom 250,000 live in Baghdad. An exodus to the neighboring countries of Syria, Jordan and Turkey has left behind closed parishes, seminaries and convents. As a small minority without a militia of their own, Iraqi Christians have been persecuted by both Shi’a and Sunni Muslim militias, and also by criminal gangs.
As of June 21, 2007, the UNHCR estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 2 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month. A May 25, 2007 article notes that in the past seven months only 69 people from Iraq have been granted refugee status in the United States.
One of the most recent tragic events of the present Iraqi situation for the Christian community is the assassination by Islamic terrorists of Chaldean Catholic priest Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni and subdeacons Basman Yousef Daud, Wahid Hanna Isho, and Gassan Isam Bidawed in the ancient city of Mosul. Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni was driving with his three deacons when they were stopped by Muslim terrorists who demanded their conversion to Islam, when they refused the terrorists shot them.[24] Six months later, the body of archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found buried near Mosul. He was kidnapped on February 29, 2008 when his bodyguards and driver were killed.
Kosovo
After the defeat of a Christian Balkan coalition lead by a prince of Serbia, Lazar, the Ottomans occupied Kosovo. The Christian population of Kosovo was composed overwhelmingly of Serbs (see Demographic history of Kosovo). Initially, former Christian nobles were allowed to maintain their properties and privileges, especially the local nobles that fought on the side of the Ottomans during the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Orthodox and Catholic churches of Kosovo during the Ottoman period were awarded special protections and rights including placing Christians under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Christian casualties of the War in Lebanon
The war in Lebanon saw a number of massacres of both Christians and Muslims. Among the earliest was the Damour Massacre in 1975 when Palestinian militias attacked Christian civilians. The persecution in Lebanon combined sectarian, political, ideological, and retaliation reasons. The Syrian regime was also involved in persecuting Christians as well as Muslims in Lebanon.
Sudan
In Sudan, it is estimated that over 1.5 million Christians have been killed by the Janjaweed, the Arab Muslim militia, and even suspected Islamists in northern Sudan since 1984.
It should also be noted that Sudan's several civil wars (which often take the form of genocidal campaigns) are often not only or purely religious in nature, but also ethnic, as many black Muslims, as well as Muslim Arab tribesmen, have also been killed in the conflicts.
It is estimated that as many as 200,000 people had been taken into slavery during the Second Sudanese Civil War. The slaves are mostly Dinka people.
Pakistan
In Pakistan 1.5% of the population are Christian. Pakistani law mandates that "blasphemies" of the Qur'an are to be met with punishment. Ayub Masih, a Christian, was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 1998. He was accused by a neighbor of stating that he supported British writer, Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Lower appeals courts upheld the conviction. However, before the Pakistan Supreme Court, his lawyer was able to prove that the accuser had used the conviction to force Masih's family off their land and then acquired control of the property. Masih has been released.
The Christian community in Pakistan is the target of attacks by Islamic extremists.
On September 25, 2002 two terrorists entered the "Peace and Justice Institute", Karachi, where they separated Muslims from the Christians, and then murdered eight Christians by shooting them in the head. All of the victims were Pakistani Christians. Karachi police chief Tariq Jamil said the victims had their hands tied and their mouths had been covered with tape.
In November 2005 3,000 militant Islamists attacked Christians in Sangla Hill in Pakistan and destroyed Roman Catholic, Salvation Army and United Presbyterian churches. The attack was over allegations of violation of blasphemy laws by a Pakistani Christian named Yousaf Masih. The attacks were widely condemned by some political parties in Pakistan.
On June 5, 2006 a Pakistani Christian stonemason named Nasir Ashraf was working near Lahore when he drank water from a public facility using a glass chained to the facility. He was assaulted by Muslims for "Polluting the glass". A mob developed, who beat Ashraf, calling him a "Christian dog". Bystanders encouraged the beating and joined in. Ashraf was eventually hospitalized.
One year later, in August 2007, a Christian missionary couple, Rev. Arif and Kathleen Khan, were gunned down by militant Islamists in Islamabad. The "official" position in Pakistan is that the killer was a fellow Christian, and that the killings were "justified" as an honor killing under the false pretext that the missionaries were engaged in sexual harassment, an assertion widely doubted in the international media, as well as by Pakistani Christians.
In other Muslim nations
In Egypt the government does not officially recognize conversions from Islam to Christianity; because certain interfaith marriages are not allowed either, this prevents marriages between converts to Christianity and those born in Christian communities, and also results in the children of Christian converts being classified as Muslims and given a Muslim education. The government also requires permits for repairing churches or building new ones, which are often withheld. Foreign missionaries are allowed in the country only if they restrict their activities to social improvements and refrain from proselytizing. The Coptic Pope Shenouda III was internally exiled in 1981 by President Anwar Sadat, who then chose five Coptic bishops and asked them to choose a new pope. They refused, and in 1985 President Hosni Mubarak restored Pope Shenouda III, who had been accused of fomenting interconfessional strife. Particularly in Upper Egypt, the rise in extremist Islamist groups such as the Gama'at Islamiya during the 1980s was accompanied by attacks on Copts and on Coptic churches; these have since declined with the decline of those organizations, but still continue. The police have been accused of siding with the attackers in some of these cases.
There have been anti-Christian incidents carried out in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. Some claim that this represents a pattern of deliberate mistreatment by the PA; others hold that these are isolated incidents that reflect the beliefs of the individuals involved, but not the society in general. Two American courts, one in Illinois and the other in North Carolina, accepted the threat of "religious persecution" as grounds for granting asylum to Evangelical converts fleeing PA territory. There is an ongoing trend for emigration among Palestinian Christians doubling that of Muslims. The ratio of Christians among Palestinians went from 18%-20% in 1947 to 13% in 1966 to 2.1% in 1993.
Though Iran recognizes Assyrian and Armenian Christians as a religious minority (along with Jews and Zoroastrians) and they have representatives in the Parliament, after the 1979 Revolution, Muslim converts to Christianity (typically to Protestant Christianity) have been arrested and sometimes executed.[36] See also: Christianity in Iran.
In Saudi Arabia Christians are arrested and lashed in public for practicing their faith openly.[37] Bibles and other non-Muslim religious books are captured, piled up and burned by the religious police of Saudi. No non-Muslims are allowed to become Saudi citizens. Prayer services by Christians are frequently broken up by the police and the Christians are arrested and tortured without even allowing them to be released on bail.
In the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf has attacked and killed Christians.
In Indonesia, religious conflicts have typically occurred in Western New Guinea, Maluku (particularly Ambon), and Sulawesi. The presence of Muslims in these regions is in part a result of the transmigrasi program of population re-distribution. Conflicts have often occurred because of the aims of radical Islamist organizations such as Jemaah Islamiah or Laskar Jihad to impose Sharia.
Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old Afghan citizen, was charged in Afghanistan with rejecting Islam (apostasy), a crime punishable by death under Sharia law. He has since been released into exile in the West under intense pressure from Western governments.
Here's more for the Islamic Fanatical Apologists to chew on:
The kidnapping of Christian girls by Muslim Arabs and Kurds in Iraq in the last few years -- and the suicide of at least one Assyrian girl following rape by her Kurdish master -- is a subject that can be found discussed at Assyrian websites. None of this has been reported in the Western press.
This is not strange. The world press simply has not bothered to study Islam; as a consequence, it usually ends up offering “mere” reportage which does not delve, does not comprehend, and repeats the latest Arab or Muslim propaganda and shuns matter which might call into question the Muslim-friendly view of things.
Take, for example, the coverage of the “Palestinian” conflict with Israel --* that is to say, the Arab Jihad against Israel, where the local Arabs renamed themselves post-1967 the “Palestinian people,” and with a little help from Edward Said and a cast of thousands made everyone forget that 1) Jews in Israel came from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, where for more than a millennium and a half they were cruelly mistreated as dhimmis (and in some places, such as Yemen, as chattel slaves) * and not only from Europe. 2) that more than 90% of the land of what became Mandatory Palestine was owned by the Ottoman state, and then passed to the successor authorities, first the government of Mandatory Palestine, and then to the state of Israel. The small amount that was privately owned was bought and paid for by the Jewish National Fund, and other Samaritan organizations, often at exceedingly high costs, from absentee Arab landlords * not a single dunam of land was taken until the 1948 attack on the nascent Jewish state by five Arab armies. 3) the ruin and desolation in the area, which Edward Said so monstrously mocked, was a fact testified to by the very people whom he claimed stood for the opposite principle * from Lamartine and Chateaubriand to Melville and Mark Twain. 4) the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya is the immutable principle of all Muslim treaties with Infidels, yet not a single reporter has ever managed to allude to this treaty, much less to show that any research --* such as a reading of Majid Khadduri --* has gone into an understanding of the Muslim Law of War and Peace.
Now we come to the discussion of Christians. It was quite something to observe the evident want not only of sympathy, but of any understanding, of what the Maronites and other Christians were facing in Lebanon. They were consistently described as “right-wing” Christians, though that epithet was meaningless. What made Christian farmers and peasants in Damour, massacred by the hundreds, into “right-wingers”? Nothing at all, except that the Homeric epithet is used as an all-purpose damning device by a credulous press. And as for the Copts in Egypt, who bothered, under the reign of Saint Sadat (my, how quickly he passed, and his phony sainthood with him, but not before the Sinai was completely pocketed by Egypt in exchange for * nothing), to note the self-imposed internal exile of Pope Shenouda? Copts in Egypt are persecuted; many of them, of course, parrot the Muslim Arab line about other quasi-dhimmi communities * i.e. the Jews of Israel * which has been, as Bat Ye’or said, a consistent pattern among the various dhimmi communities that, instead of identifying with and helping each other, each tried to strike a separate deal with the Muslim overlords who terrorized them (so much for the “protected peoples” idea).
And if the treatment of the Maronites in the world press was bad, and that of the Copts nearly as bad, so is that of the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians. They are the true indigenes, the descendants of those who were in Mesopotamia long before the Muslim Arabs arrived in small numbers, but nevertheless relentlessly managed to Islamize and to Arabize, non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples. The remnant that managed to survive is now being marginalized -- whether under Saddam’s direct rule or Sistani’s indirect rule hardly matters, for the key to the marginalization of all these indigenous Christian groups is Islam.
And the Kurds, themselves victims of Arab Muslims, have been painted in the American press as worthy of our sympathy and support. So they are, but less out of sentimental reasons, and more out of the cold calculation that a free Kurdistan will weaken various states *-- Iraq, Iran, Syria, and even Turkey, if it does not behave itself in less Erdoganish a fashion (for America, too, can be fickle with its allegiances, and should begin to make clear that none of these so-called Muslim allies is an ally, but rather, a possible source of short term support and cooperation, and nothing more) * and would also, merely by coming into existence, heighten the awareness that the so-called “Arab world” has a large number of minorities, either non-Muslim or non-Arab Muslim, that deserve sovereign states of their own. Lebanon, if put back, should once again become the focal point of Christian interest. Israel needs to be kept from Roadmap-assisted suicide (aided and abetted by the senile dementia, or at least crazed obstinacy, of Sharon). And an independent Kurdistan might give Berbers in North Africa the kind of ideas that Kateb Yacine, who hated the forced islamization and cultural oppression of the Berbers, thought they should entertain.
In the reports from Iraq about the treatment of Christians, aside from bombings of churches (that cannot be overlooked), the much more widespread, and insidious anti-Christian acts (there are no Jews to string up any more, as in the June 1-2, 1941 Farhud or Pogrom --* see Naim Kattan’s memoir --* or in the last show-hanging of “Zionist spies” early in Saddam Hussein’s regime, a hanging to which half-a-million delighted Iraqs came, in order to enjoy the spectacle), all over, from those Shi’a some (such as Stephen Schwartz) believe are so very meek and mild, and nothing to worry about (this would come as a surprise to many in the Islamic Republic of Iran), and who are currently praised because they went and cast their ballots for “democracy” (actually, they cast their ballots for something quite different -- in order to obtain power; had they been 20% of the population, they would have bitterly opposed the elections), who have watched Christian businessmen be assassinated in Basra, or in the Sunni isosceles or more accurately scalene triangle, where the last eight Christian families living in Ramadi saw the men killed, the women seized, the children forcibly Islamized (all with American army troops within rescue distance), or in the Kurdish territories.
One is now in the habit of exaggerating the wonderfulness of the Kurds, simply because they were victims of Saddam Hussein, and because they have been, for good and sufficient reasons of their own, much more favorably disposed towards the American effort. Indeed, American soldiers in Iraq often in the last two years have taken to referring to “the Iraqis” and “the Kurds” as if the former were the enemy, and the latter our trusted friends. Quasi-trusted, semi-friends.
Behavior over a long period of time, sufficiently consistent, and having been prompted by impulses that have not changed (Islamic tenets have not changed) may be a reasonable guide to present and future behavior. The behavior of the Muslim Kurds toward non-Muslims has been, over time, sufficiently consistent, and prompted by the same Muslim doctrines that have caused Jihad-conquest and the imposition of dhimmitude to be so similar in time and space, over 1300 years (or perhaps a little less, as Islam likely got its start not in the 7th but rather in the 8th or even early 9th centuries, as is now becoming apparent from Western scholarly efforts).
As is well known, the European powers attempted to force the Ottoman government to begin treating its non-Muslim populations with decency. That government proved most reluctant to do so, and again and again European pressure had to be brought to bear long after the famous Tanzimat "reforms" were initially declared. In the meantime, the Muslim masses were happy to engage in the massacres and rapine which punctuated this period "reform."
And those Muslims were not only Turks, or Arabs. Kurds were among them. The victims were Maronites, Armenians, asin the case of the attacks on Christians in Damascus in 1860 (which led the Christians, in turn, to attack not the Muslims who had been murdering them, but the the entirely inoffensive community of Jews -- simply because the latter could not fight back) or in the 1869 attacks on Armenians. For the latter, see pp. 281 ff. of Bat Ye'or’s The Dhimmi, which offers a number of reports from Western diplomats, travellers, and missionaries, detailing as one eyewitness noted, “the abject terror the Koords have driven into the Christians."
The 1869 massacre of Armenians and of other Christians (chiefly Maronites, who were not limited to Lebanon) by Kurds, was followed in 1894-96 by the massacres of Armenians that served as a kind of prelude to the 1915-1922 genocide. Eyewitness accounts by American missionaries testify to the “leadership role” (as business schools like to call it) of the Kurds in this massacre, as a number of such books appeared brimful of such collections of American outrage in the 1890s. In the later genocide, Kurds took part enthusiastically * and why not? It was a war not of Turk against Armenian, but of Muslim against “giavour,” which is why the Turks could, if they wish, blame the promptings of “fanatical Islam” which, they could (falsely) claim, is no longer observed in Turkey. But they can’t; they won’t; Islam can never be disowned, not in the slightest, by Believers.
As is well known, many of the Jews in the Middle East endured the status of virtual slavery, chattel slaves who could be killed at will (see R. S. Serjeant’s articles, which discuss Yemeni Jews even into the 1950s, and Serjeant was, remarkably, an apologist for Islam, as his subsequent attack on Crone and Cook’s Hagarism makes clear). But in Kurdistan, too, the Jews lived as virtual slaves. differently than they now do, after centuries of Islam. But how many are aware that the so-called “Kurdish Jews” were in fact simply Jews who were owned as slaves by Kurdish masters, and whose lives, and property, were disposed of virtually at will.
American soldiers and officials in Iraq may be aware that the Iraqi Christians, both Chaldeans and Assyrians and Armenians, have to be extremely careful what they say and what they do. While Saddam Hussein was in power, his household staff, including his food-tasters, were largely comprised of Christians who have fulfilled the same function for American officials in the Green Zone. He did this not because he was a wise and tolerant man, but because he was cunning, and knew that alone of all the groups in Iraq, it was the Christians who were most helpless, and would be no threat to his regime * they needed him, he did not need them. No doubt the Iraqi Christians, as dhimmis, will continue to be craven in the protective mimicry of some of the attitudes they adopt (noe, for example, within Iraq, will dare to demonstrate any sense that their treatment, as dhimmis, has something to do with the implacable hostility of Arab Muslims to the non-Muslim sovereign state of Israel * how could they, after all?).
But the American soliders in Iraq were more fully informed about the historic persecution of non-Muslims, by Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Kurds alike, they might be more keenly aware of the need to make sure that such things as the preventing of Assyrian voting were strongly protested, and those guilty made to suffer. The Kurds, at the moment, may think that in American eyes they can do no wrong * and so are prepared to get away with murder. They have to have another think coming. Soon enough the momentary triumph of the election will be put into perspective; the jostling for power begin, and the whole business of “democracy” as the key to Infidel self-defense be seen as the naïve business it is, even if it is promoted by someone as admirable as Natan Sharansky (whose experience, and knowledge, are of Communism, and who knows nothing of the very different history of Jihad-conquest and dhimmitude), whose views have apparently had a big influence on the impressionable President.
Would that instead of Sharansky’s book, Bat Ye’or’s The Dhimmi or The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam or Eurabia could be sent to the Bush Book Club, as described in today’s New York Times. It would do some good, and get us out of Iraq faster, for then the full extent of the problem, which “democracy” will not alleviate and may even worsen, would lead to a more thoughtful and cunning deployment of anti-Jihad resources around the world.
In Gaza, approximately 3,000 Christians still call this territory home -- with the majority of the community living within Gaza City near the three main churches: the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Gaza Baptist.
Christians in Gaza have the same rights as their Muslim neighbors, rights guaranteed under the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Within the Legislative Council, several seats have been reserved for Christian leaders.
Seventeen-year-old Christian student Ali al-Jeldah told IPS about attending a dual faith school: "My life is normal and I've never felt oppressed. Being Muslim or Christian is never an issue."
"I have many Muslim friends. We hang out and study together with no differences at all," Al Jeldah said.
Lelias Ali, a 16-year-old Muslim student at Holy Family School, concurs. "We have a unity of struggle, a unity of aim -- to live under the same circumstances. This land is for both of us and being a Christian or Muslim should not separate us," she said.
"I have lots of friends. Being Muslim or Christian is not an issue," Diana al-Sadi, a 17-year-old student told IPS.
"I go to my friends' homes for happy and sad occasions," al-Sadi said, "including Christmas and Easter. They visit mine during Eid [the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan]."
When the students were asked if Christians are being harassed by Hamas or the Palestinian police, all agreed that this was not the case.
"Every society has extremists," Lelias Ali states. "Sometimes I'm criticized for not wearing my hijab [headscarf]. But that has nothing to do with being Muslim or Christian. Those people don't represent our Palestinian society."
Pausing for a moment, she considered the assertions in the international media regarding Muslims and Christians: "We should not let such ideas sneak into our minds. If we don't unite, then we lose."
Asked if Christians in Gaza feel singled out or oppressed, Musallam says, "Palestinian Christians are not a religious community set apart in some corner. They are part of the Palestinian people."
But what of Hamas, an Islamic political organization? Have Palestinian Christians experienced persecution or racism under their leadership, as Western papers insinuate?
"Our relationship with Hamas is as people of one nation," Musallam contends. "Hamas doesn't fight religious groups. Its fight is against the Israeli occupation.
And what of the Western media assertions that Gaza's Christians are considering emigrating because of Islamic oppression?
Sighing, Musallam corrects the misconception. "If Christians emigrate," he states resolutely, "It's not because of Muslims. It is because we suffer from Israeli siege. We seek a life of freedom. A life different from the life of the dogs we are currently forced to live."
"we want them to have a state of their own" Shimon Peres
*cough* BULLSHIT!!
Palestinian state means more Palestinians...perhaps even Palestinian immigration.. :eeK: :eek:
That's like saying "I hope I get cancer" for the Zionists.
Gotta see it clearly here....hehe
actually... not funny.... it could be a bigger problem.
Progress is not made by everyone joining some new fad,
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
Nothing in what you've posted here demonstrates that the European media takes the side of Palestinians.
Greasing Up to Power
Posted July 13, 2004 http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/13/greasing-up-to-power/
'The Glasgow study shows that BBC and ITN news reports are biased in favour of Israel and against the Palestinians.(7) Almost three times as much coverage is given to each Israeli death as to each Palestinian death. Killings by Palestinians are routinely described as “atrocities” and “murders”, while Palestinians deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers have been reported as “caught in the crossfire.”(8) In the period the researchers studied, Israeli spokespeople were given twice as much time to speak as Palestinians. Both BBC and ITN reports have described the West Bank as part of Israel.(9) By failing to explain that the Palestinians are living under military occupation, following the illegal seizure of their land, correspondents routinely reduce the conflict to an inexplicable “cycle of violence”. Even this cycle is presented as being driven by the Palestinians: the Israelis are reported as “responding” or “retaliating” to Palestinian attacks; violence by the Palestinians is seldom explained as a response to attacks by Israelis.(10) Both networks regularly claim that the US government is seeking peace in the region (ITN has described it as “even-handed”) while omitting to mention that it is supplying some $3 billion a year of military aid to Israel.(11)'
Of course the Glasgow study shows the media to be unbiased. Our studies show we're unbiased too lol. I can admit our media is very biased and there's no doubt about it but I find it odd for you to be in denial about your own. C’mon Byrnzie I know you’re smarter than that which is why I responded to your post in the first place.
Last year's winner of the Dishonest Reporting Award received a slew of nominations again this year. Members particularly criticized B BC for being caught altering a quote by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, substituting the word "terror" with the word "violence" in reference to Palestinians. Does BBC still believe that terror only occurs in the British Isles?
== IGNOBLE AWARD WINNER ==
And now for the winner of the Dishonest Reporting Award 2002. A huge number of nominations expressed alarm over media coverage of the Jenin battle in April. Most notably, the British media reported "facts" of IDF massacres, atrocities, summary executions, and mass graves -- which in the end were shown by United Nations and Human Rights Watch reports to have been fabricated by overzealous Palestinian "witnesses."
Here are a few examples of how the British media reported on Jenin:
"We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide..." -- London Evening Standard
"Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." -- The Times of London
Israel's actions in Jenin were "every bit as repellent" as Osama Bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11. -- The Guardian
"Hundreds of victims 'were buried by bulldozer in mass grave'." -- Daily Telegraph
Why the overzealous reaction based on spurious evidence?
Alon Ben-David, a veteran military correspondent for the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (and currently at Harvard), told UPI: "A large part of the European media regards itself as not just reporters but as ideological crusaders. They are in the business of journalism not just for the business. They want to do good in the world. They have agendas."
Looking back, the alarmist Jenin coverage has impacted the Mideast conflict in three key respects:
1) Palestinian Mythology
By allowing unfounded rumors to be reported as factual, the media has helped create a false Palestinian mythology over the battle of Jenin: i.e. the few fought the many and bravely chose to die in battle rather than surrender. Just as plenty of people are willing to believe that the Israeli Mossad was somehow behind September 11, plenty are willing to believe that the IDF got away with murder in Jenin, too.
This slipshod coverage adds fuel to the fire of those who falsely accuse the IDF of using excessive force. In reality, by using ground troops instead of an aerial assault, IDF troops put themselves in danger in order to spare Palestinian casualties -- and lost 23 soldiers in Jenin.
Since these myths are now part of Palestinian lore, true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians becomes more difficult. Palestinians will resurrect and spuriously compare Jenin to Sabra and Shatilla (where Christian Phalangists indeed massacred hundreds of Palestinian refugees), proving how poor media coverage of can further widen the Israeli-Palestinian gulf.
* * *
2) Residual References
Even after the allegations of a "massacre" were proven false, some of the media can't seem to let go. In August, Peter Cave of Australia's ABC insisted:
"I personally saw 30 Palestinian corpses at the hospital on April the 20th, and with dozens of other foreign reporters, watched them being buried at a mass grave just up the road from the hospital... Just as in Tiananmen Square, the power of the gun and the tank ensured there was no proper body count or accounting. Just as happened in Tiananmen Square, the uninformed and those with their own agenda, are now claiming there was no massacre. There was a massacre, a considerable number of human beings were indiscriminately and unnecessarily slaughtered..."
The media continues to trump up the Jenin charges in other ways. In November, when former IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz was appointed Defense Minister, BBC reported that Mofaz "directed some of Israel's most controversial operations in the West Bank earlier this year, including Jenin -- where Palestinians claim a massacre took place -- and Ramallah."
After HonestReporting complaints, BBC subsequently changed the wording to "Jenin -- where a Palestinian refugee camp was all but demolished..." This, too, is biased wording, as fighting only took place in a 200-square-meter area -- about 6% of the total area of the camp.
* * *
3) Credibility of Palestinian Spokesmen
HonestReporting has encouraged the media to challenge specious and inaccurate claims made by Palestinian spokesmen, particularly the charges of massacres. On April 14, Saeb Erekat was challenged by CNN's Bill Hemmer: "You said specifically, and others said 500 in Jenin... Where are you getting evidence that shows 500 people were killed there? ...If [Israel's] numbers are right and your initial numbers are wrong, will you come back here on our network and retract what you said?"
Erekat: "Absolutely."
(We're still waiting.)
With so many Palestinian spokesmen issuing false accusations about Jenin, this calls into question the general advisability of the media relying on Palestinian claims.
In April, Palestinian spokesman Nabil Sha'ath went on CNN to report that 30 Palestinian women died in labor at Israeli checkpoints. The canard joins other Palestinian claims of Israel using radioactive ammunition, Nazi tactics, and nerve gas, along with the charges that Jewish settlers tortured Palestinians (though investigations later revealed they had actually died in traffic accidents or were executed by Palestinians as "collaborators").
Also in April, Palestinian spokesmen claimed that documents confiscated from Arafat's compound in Ramallah, detailing Arafat's senior advisors' involvement in suicide bombings and terrorism, were fraudulent forgeries. Abdel Rahman told CNN: "This is a fraud by the Israeli intelligence, sir. The Israelis have a department that specializes in putting out lies." And Nasser Al-Kidwa (Palestinian representative to the UN) told CNN: "...some kind of James Bond activities... bits and pieces of rumors and unsubstantiated claims."
If Palestinian spokespeople repeatedly use the media as a platform to promote outright lies, doesn't the media have a responsibility to ban that spokesperson, and to generally be wary of unquestionably swallowing Palestinian claims?
* * *
It may take years for the Jenin dust to settle. But one thing we have learned: The British media will not hesitate to promote a biased anti-Israel agenda, whether or not the facts are there to back it up.
We recall how the global chorus of condemnation prompted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to call on Israel on to halt its military operations. "Can the whole world be wrong?" he asked.
In fact, the whole world was wrong. Phil Reeves of The Independent, known as a frequent critic of Israel, wrote of Jenin: "Even journalists have to admit they're wrong sometimes."
But it was too little, too late. The damage had been done. And for that, the British media deserves the Dishonest Reporting Award 2002.
...
Want more
There's is so much conflicting information on the internet it's hard to decide what to believe as I don't know if the above is correct either.
"...believe in lies...to get by...it's divine...whoa...oh, you know what its like..."
Treatment of Palestinian Christians ‘Medieval’
Violence and behind-the-scenes persecution are contributing to a mass exodus of Christians from the Palestinian territories
(July 30, 2007) – Arab Christians are leaving the Palestinian territories in droves due to discrimination and persecution from a Muslim-dominant police force and government, Dr. Justus Weiner, a distinguished scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told reporters and academics at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. on July 17.
“For a number of years now, this minority community [of Christians] has been in dire need of assistance,” he said. “Palestinian Christians are unable to practice their religion in freedom and in peace.
“Most in danger are Arab Christians. And most in danger among Arab Christians are those who have converted from Islam. They are often left defenseless against cruelty from Muslim fundamentalists.”
Weiner, an internationally recognized human rights lawyer, began advocating for Palestinian Christians nine years ago, after being surprised to discover that a problem even existed. He learned that “systematic persecution” was being met with total silence by most of the developed world, including human rights groups.
Due to the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, Weiner pointed out that the city of Bethlehem, which in 1948 was nearly 80 percent Christian, is today barely 12 percent. He also noted that Christians make up less than 2 percent of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They’re practically at the point of disappearing—nobody denies this,” he said.
Weiner cited several specific examples of persecution, including an Armenian Christian jeweler arrested without cause and beaten for eight hours in a Palestinian police station.
Another case involved a 16-year-old girl from Bethlehem who was kidnapped by a 23-year-old Muslim man who told police she had willingly eloped. High-level diplomacy secured the Christian girl’s release, but only because she was an American citizen.
Human rights violations against Palestinian Christians, according to Weiner, also include: individual loss of job or property; firebombed churches; destruction of Christian-based centers; beatings; torture; forced marriages; sexual harassment; and extortion.
He noted that most of the persecution has taken place since the empowerment of the Palestinian Authority in 1995 under Yasser Arafat. He described the torture suffered by Christian converts from Islam since then as “the kind of thing you only read about in Medieval books—it’s very difficult to describe.”
Anti-Christian violence made international news last month when a Catholic convent was ransacked and desecrated during Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza, according to the Associated Press (AP). The incident touched off fresh fear among Gaza’s Christian community, which numbers 3,000 compared with 1.4 million Muslims.
Because of the work of lawyers like Weiner, other human rights activists are increasingly sounding an alarm in the international community to wake up the world to the plight of Arab Christians throughout the Middle East. Analysts estimate as much as half of Iraq’s Christians have left the country.
At a “Save the Christians” rally in Rome earlier this month, the AP reported several hundred people gathered to demand an end to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. In addition to top Vatican officials and Italy’s former Premier Berlusconi, a prominent Jewish activist from the U.S. also attended.
“I stand here tonight as an American Jew and as a survivor of the Holocaust to say to you that ‘never again’ was a pledge that the Jewish people learned with great pain and sadness,” said Abraham Foxman, U.S. director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But ‘never again’ is not limited to Jewish pain and suffering…I pledge to you that our voices will be heard whenever Christians are discriminated against.”
Treatment of Palestinian Christians ‘Medieval’
Violence and behind-the-scenes persecution are contributing to a mass exodus of Christians from the Palestinian territories
(July 30, 2007) – Arab Christians are leaving the Palestinian territories in droves due to discrimination and persecution from a Muslim-dominant police force and government, Dr. Justus Weiner, a distinguished scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told reporters and academics at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. on July 17.
“For a number of years now, this minority community [of Christians] has been in dire need of assistance,” he said. “Palestinian Christians are unable to practice their religion in freedom and in peace.
“Most in danger are Arab Christians. And most in danger among Arab Christians are those who have converted from Islam. They are often left defenseless against cruelty from Muslim fundamentalists.”
Weiner, an internationally recognized human rights lawyer, began advocating for Palestinian Christians nine years ago, after being surprised to discover that a problem even existed. He learned that “systematic persecution” was being met with total silence by most of the developed world, including human rights groups.
Due to the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, Weiner pointed out that the city of Bethlehem, which in 1948 was nearly 80 percent Christian, is today barely 12 percent. He also noted that Christians make up less than 2 percent of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They’re practically at the point of disappearing—nobody denies this,” he said.
Weiner cited several specific examples of persecution, including an Armenian Christian jeweler arrested without cause and beaten for eight hours in a Palestinian police station.
Another case involved a 16-year-old girl from Bethlehem who was kidnapped by a 23-year-old Muslim man who told police she had willingly eloped. High-level diplomacy secured the Christian girl’s release, but only because she was an American citizen.
Human rights violations against Palestinian Christians, according to Weiner, also include: individual loss of job or property; firebombed churches; destruction of Christian-based centers; beatings; torture; forced marriages; sexual harassment; and extortion.
He noted that most of the persecution has taken place since the empowerment of the Palestinian Authority in 1995 under Yasser Arafat. He described the torture suffered by Christian converts from Islam since then as “the kind of thing you only read about in Medieval books—it’s very difficult to describe.”
Anti-Christian violence made international news last month when a Catholic convent was ransacked and desecrated during Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza, according to the Associated Press (AP). The incident touched off fresh fear among Gaza’s Christian community, which numbers 3,000 compared with 1.4 million Muslims.
Because of the work of lawyers like Weiner, other human rights activists are increasingly sounding an alarm in the international community to wake up the world to the plight of Arab Christians throughout the Middle East. Analysts estimate as much as half of Iraq’s Christians have left the country.
At a “Save the Christians” rally in Rome earlier this month, the AP reported several hundred people gathered to demand an end to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. In addition to top Vatican officials and Italy’s former Premier Berlusconi, a prominent Jewish activist from the U.S. also attended.
“I stand here tonight as an American Jew and as a survivor of the Holocaust to say to you that ‘never again’ was a pledge that the Jewish people learned with great pain and sadness,” said Abraham Foxman, U.S. director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But ‘never again’ is not limited to Jewish pain and suffering…I pledge to you that our voices will be heard whenever Christians are discriminated against.”
- Paul Steven Ghiringhelli
Ok...ill take every instance of violence against muslims after 9/11 and post them on here and generalize it as Christian Crimes against muslims. There are cases of violence against any religion, im sure you're capable of googling crimes against muslims. The picture i posted was Christmas in Iran. According to your post Christians are persecuted or executed....so the that shop is just a trap to draw in Christians?
Ok...ill take every instance of violence against muslims after 9/11 and post them on here and generalize it as Christian Crimes against muslims. There are cases of violence against any religion, im sure you're capable of googling crimes against muslims. The picture i posted was Christmas in Iran. According to your post Christians are persecuted or executed....so the that shop is just a trap to draw in Christians?
You post pictures of Christmas in Iran, as if Iran was this incredibly tolerant nation. Next, will you be posting pictures of a Gay Pride Parade in Tehran? Oh yeah, there are no gays in Iran.
Of course the Glasgow study shows the media to be unbiased. Our studies show we're unbiased too lol. I can admit our media is very biased and there's no doubt about it but I find it odd for you to be in denial about your own. C’mon Byrnzie I know you’re smarter than that which is why I responded to your post in the first place.
No. The Glasgow study shows the media to be biased, not unbiased.
As for the article you posted a link to; I notice that that website - 'Honest reporting' - it's nothing of the sort. The site is dedicated to attacking anyone and everyone who makes any sort of criticism of Israeli policies or atrocities:
'It was Yom Kippur, 2000. The Intifada had just broken out and a huge wave of terror had suddenly descended upon Israel. The media in Europe was twisting the story to brand Israel as a bad guy! Jews in the UK were in shock and felt under attack. A few idealists decided enough was enough.'
I notice that both John Pilger, and Jonathan Hari - recently nominated for a journalist of the year award - both come under attack for criticizing Israel.
Basically, the website is a fucking joke.
You post pictures of Christmas in Iran, as if Iran was this incredibly tolerant nation. Next, will you be posting pictures of a Gay Pride Parade in Tehran? Oh yeah, there are no gays in Iran.
Just as you speak of Israel and claim it is tolerant? Things come full circle huh?
Nothing in what you've posted here demonstrates that the European media takes the side of Palestinians.
Greasing Up to Power
Posted July 13, 2004 http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/07/13/greasing-up-to-power/
'The Glasgow study shows that BBC and ITN news reports are biased in favour of Israel and against the Palestinians.(7) Almost three times as much coverage is given to each Israeli death as to each Palestinian death. Killings by Palestinians are routinely described as “atrocities” and “murders”, while Palestinians deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers have been reported as “caught in the crossfire.”(8) In the period the researchers studied, Israeli spokespeople were given twice as much time to speak as Palestinians. Both BBC and ITN reports have described the West Bank as part of Israel.(9) By failing to explain that the Palestinians are living under military occupation, following the illegal seizure of their land, correspondents routinely reduce the conflict to an inexplicable “cycle of violence”. Even this cycle is presented as being driven by the Palestinians: the Israelis are reported as “responding” or “retaliating” to Palestinian attacks; violence by the Palestinians is seldom explained as a response to attacks by Israelis.(10) Both networks regularly claim that the US government is seeking peace in the region (ITN has described it as “even-handed”) while omitting to mention that it is supplying some $3 billion a year of military aid to Israel.(11)'
Would it? Do you have any evidence to support these claims?
Not that they're in any way relevant of course. If you think that the illegal occupation can be justified on the grounds of over-population within Israel then I wish you the best of luck.
No. But It's also not as complicated as people like to pretend.
On a more serious note, page 17 pretty much describes the increase in Palestinian sympathy with the increase in media coverage in 5 European countries in this study.
Sounds like some Christian conservatives I know in denial...hehe
Progress is not made by everyone joining some new fad,
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
Treatment of Palestinian Christians ‘Medieval’
Violence and behind-the-scenes persecution are contributing to a mass exodus of Christians from the Palestinian territories
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9126.shtml
'...But what of Hamas, an Islamic political organization? Have Palestinian Christians experienced persecution or racism under their leadership, as Western papers insinuate?
"Our relationship with Hamas is as people of one nation," Musallam contends. "Hamas doesn't fight religious groups. Its fight is against the Israeli occupation.
And what of the Western media assertions that Gaza's Christians are considering emigrating because of Islamic oppression?
Sighing, Musallam corrects the misconception. "If Christians emigrate," he states resolutely, "It's not because of Muslims. It is because we suffer from Israeli siege. We seek a life of freedom. A life different from the life of the dogs we are currently forced to live."
On a more serious note, page 17 pretty much describes the increase in Palestinian sympathy with the increase in media coverage in 5 European countries in this study.
I can't be bothered to download and read this pdf file so I'll just take your word for it that Palestinians are grateful for an alleged increase in media coverage of their plight.
O.k. So how does any of this relate to the subject of the occupation and the ongoing crimes against humanity and other breaches of the Geneva convention being committed by Israel?
Or are we going to continue attempting to muddy the water with these irrelevancies?
No. The Glasgow study shows the media to be biased, not unbiased.
As for the article you posted a link to; I notice that that website - 'Honest reporting' - it's nothing of the sort. The site is dedicated to attacking anyone and everyone who makes any sort of criticism of Israeli policies or atrocities:
'It was Yom Kippur, 2000. The Intifada had just broken out and a huge wave of terror had suddenly descended upon Israel. The media in Europe was twisting the story to brand Israel as a bad guy! Jews in the UK were in shock and felt under attack. A few idealists decided enough was enough.'
I notice that both John Pilger, and Jonathan Hari - recently nominated for a journalist of the year award - both come under attack for criticizing Israel.
Basically, the website is a fucking joke.
Right biased for Israel lol.
Yeah I know that's what the was for lol. I thought it was funny especially that it mentions the US reporters including FOX new talking against Israel.
BTW searching the Internet is terrible you read one thing and then you read the exact opposite.
If it's not the media influencing Europeans to sympathize with the Palestinians my internet searching basically comes up with Europeans have been anti-semitic for a long long time and continue to be the same. I'm not going to post the links because I think that's ridiculous and refuse to believe it. I rather blame the media lol.
How many peoples/countries are occupying lands that don't "belong" to them? I guess going back in history pretty much every race, nationality or group of people are guilty of this. And Israelis aren't the only ones guilty of this right now.
"...believe in lies...to get by...it's divine...whoa...oh, you know what its like..."
Yeah I know that's what the was for lol. I thought it was funny especially that it mentions the US reporters including FOX new talking against Israel.
BTW searching the Internet is terrible you read one thing and then you read the exact opposite.
If it's not the media influencing Europeans to sympathize with the Palestinians my internet searching basically comes up with Europeans have been anti-semitic for a long long time and continue to be the same. I'm not going to post the links because I think that's ridiculous and refuse to believe it. I rather blame the media lol.
Yeah, there's plenty of nonsense to be found on the internet. This is why it helps to stick to the facts. They're not hard to find. Like I said above, people love to try and complicate this issue. But it's not complicated. It'd be interesting to study Western media reporting of South African Apartheid and make some comparisons. I'm sure you'd find some interesting analogies.
How many peoples/countries are occupying lands that don't "belong" to them? I guess going back in history pretty much every race, nationality or group of people are guilty of this. And Israelis aren't the only ones guilty of this right now.
Maybe. But that doesn't make them right. But by all means we can all revert back to living like barbarians if that's what you wish?
Comments
If I did that, I'd be playing into the hands of those who exaggerate my opinions/beliefs.
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
i think the analgy is fucking stupid because the images/icons of Jesus and of Muhammed are not valued or treated the same by each religion. its a nonsensical comparison
maybe if you compared it to abortion or another key aspect to christianity then maybe you're on to something. Werent there murders of abortion-praticitioners in the UK and US?? by catholics AND protestants?
There we go. Legitimate comparison
ahh, pre-emptive motive for action.
where have we seen that already..?
Christians living in predominantly Muslim countries sure aren't being treated very well. By the way, where do you live, Roland? I'm sure you don't live within an oppressive superpower...you're far too bright for that. So, where?
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
This is simply just another figment of your imagination. Next...
But there are plenty of bright people living in the U.S.
Absolutely. I'm from there, after all.
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
Again, you are making up stuff and deviating away from facts...
Christmas in Iran...look at the christians just being tortured.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1544484/posts
Change has to come from within...
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
But...
..Oh, nevermind. :rolleyes:
Wow, that proves me wrong!
Iraq
Although Christians represent less than 5% of the total Iraqi population, they make up 40% of the refugees now living in nearby countries, according to UNHCR.Northern Iraq remained predominantly Christian until the destructions of Tamerlane at the end of the 14th century. The Church of the East has its origin in what is now South East Turkey. By the end of the 13th century there were twelve Nestorian dioceses in a strip from Peking to Samarkand. When the 14th-century Muslim warlord of Turco-Mongol descent, Tamerlane (Timul Lenk), conquered Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. Timur Lenk had 70,000 Assyrian Christians beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad.
In the 16th century, Christians were half the population of Iraq.[16] In 1987, the last Iraqi census counted 1.4 million Christians.[17] They were tolerated under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, who even made one of them, Tariq Aziz, his deputy. Recently, Christians have seen their total numbers slump to about 500,000 today, of whom 250,000 live in Baghdad. An exodus to the neighboring countries of Syria, Jordan and Turkey has left behind closed parishes, seminaries and convents. As a small minority without a militia of their own, Iraqi Christians have been persecuted by both Shi’a and Sunni Muslim militias, and also by criminal gangs.
As of June 21, 2007, the UNHCR estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 2 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month. A May 25, 2007 article notes that in the past seven months only 69 people from Iraq have been granted refugee status in the United States.
One of the most recent tragic events of the present Iraqi situation for the Christian community is the assassination by Islamic terrorists of Chaldean Catholic priest Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni and subdeacons Basman Yousef Daud, Wahid Hanna Isho, and Gassan Isam Bidawed in the ancient city of Mosul. Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni was driving with his three deacons when they were stopped by Muslim terrorists who demanded their conversion to Islam, when they refused the terrorists shot them.[24] Six months later, the body of archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found buried near Mosul. He was kidnapped on February 29, 2008 when his bodyguards and driver were killed.
Kosovo
After the defeat of a Christian Balkan coalition lead by a prince of Serbia, Lazar, the Ottomans occupied Kosovo. The Christian population of Kosovo was composed overwhelmingly of Serbs (see Demographic history of Kosovo). Initially, former Christian nobles were allowed to maintain their properties and privileges, especially the local nobles that fought on the side of the Ottomans during the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Orthodox and Catholic churches of Kosovo during the Ottoman period were awarded special protections and rights including placing Christians under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Christian casualties of the War in Lebanon
The war in Lebanon saw a number of massacres of both Christians and Muslims. Among the earliest was the Damour Massacre in 1975 when Palestinian militias attacked Christian civilians. The persecution in Lebanon combined sectarian, political, ideological, and retaliation reasons. The Syrian regime was also involved in persecuting Christians as well as Muslims in Lebanon.
Sudan
In Sudan, it is estimated that over 1.5 million Christians have been killed by the Janjaweed, the Arab Muslim militia, and even suspected Islamists in northern Sudan since 1984.
It should also be noted that Sudan's several civil wars (which often take the form of genocidal campaigns) are often not only or purely religious in nature, but also ethnic, as many black Muslims, as well as Muslim Arab tribesmen, have also been killed in the conflicts.
It is estimated that as many as 200,000 people had been taken into slavery during the Second Sudanese Civil War. The slaves are mostly Dinka people.
Pakistan
In Pakistan 1.5% of the population are Christian. Pakistani law mandates that "blasphemies" of the Qur'an are to be met with punishment. Ayub Masih, a Christian, was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 1998. He was accused by a neighbor of stating that he supported British writer, Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Lower appeals courts upheld the conviction. However, before the Pakistan Supreme Court, his lawyer was able to prove that the accuser had used the conviction to force Masih's family off their land and then acquired control of the property. Masih has been released.
The Christian community in Pakistan is the target of attacks by Islamic extremists.
On September 25, 2002 two terrorists entered the "Peace and Justice Institute", Karachi, where they separated Muslims from the Christians, and then murdered eight Christians by shooting them in the head. All of the victims were Pakistani Christians. Karachi police chief Tariq Jamil said the victims had their hands tied and their mouths had been covered with tape.
In November 2005 3,000 militant Islamists attacked Christians in Sangla Hill in Pakistan and destroyed Roman Catholic, Salvation Army and United Presbyterian churches. The attack was over allegations of violation of blasphemy laws by a Pakistani Christian named Yousaf Masih. The attacks were widely condemned by some political parties in Pakistan.
On June 5, 2006 a Pakistani Christian stonemason named Nasir Ashraf was working near Lahore when he drank water from a public facility using a glass chained to the facility. He was assaulted by Muslims for "Polluting the glass". A mob developed, who beat Ashraf, calling him a "Christian dog". Bystanders encouraged the beating and joined in. Ashraf was eventually hospitalized.
One year later, in August 2007, a Christian missionary couple, Rev. Arif and Kathleen Khan, were gunned down by militant Islamists in Islamabad. The "official" position in Pakistan is that the killer was a fellow Christian, and that the killings were "justified" as an honor killing under the false pretext that the missionaries were engaged in sexual harassment, an assertion widely doubted in the international media, as well as by Pakistani Christians.
In other Muslim nations
In Egypt the government does not officially recognize conversions from Islam to Christianity; because certain interfaith marriages are not allowed either, this prevents marriages between converts to Christianity and those born in Christian communities, and also results in the children of Christian converts being classified as Muslims and given a Muslim education. The government also requires permits for repairing churches or building new ones, which are often withheld. Foreign missionaries are allowed in the country only if they restrict their activities to social improvements and refrain from proselytizing. The Coptic Pope Shenouda III was internally exiled in 1981 by President Anwar Sadat, who then chose five Coptic bishops and asked them to choose a new pope. They refused, and in 1985 President Hosni Mubarak restored Pope Shenouda III, who had been accused of fomenting interconfessional strife. Particularly in Upper Egypt, the rise in extremist Islamist groups such as the Gama'at Islamiya during the 1980s was accompanied by attacks on Copts and on Coptic churches; these have since declined with the decline of those organizations, but still continue. The police have been accused of siding with the attackers in some of these cases.
There have been anti-Christian incidents carried out in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. Some claim that this represents a pattern of deliberate mistreatment by the PA; others hold that these are isolated incidents that reflect the beliefs of the individuals involved, but not the society in general. Two American courts, one in Illinois and the other in North Carolina, accepted the threat of "religious persecution" as grounds for granting asylum to Evangelical converts fleeing PA territory. There is an ongoing trend for emigration among Palestinian Christians doubling that of Muslims. The ratio of Christians among Palestinians went from 18%-20% in 1947 to 13% in 1966 to 2.1% in 1993.
Though Iran recognizes Assyrian and Armenian Christians as a religious minority (along with Jews and Zoroastrians) and they have representatives in the Parliament, after the 1979 Revolution, Muslim converts to Christianity (typically to Protestant Christianity) have been arrested and sometimes executed.[36] See also: Christianity in Iran.
In Saudi Arabia Christians are arrested and lashed in public for practicing their faith openly.[37] Bibles and other non-Muslim religious books are captured, piled up and burned by the religious police of Saudi. No non-Muslims are allowed to become Saudi citizens. Prayer services by Christians are frequently broken up by the police and the Christians are arrested and tortured without even allowing them to be released on bail.
In the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf has attacked and killed Christians.
In Indonesia, religious conflicts have typically occurred in Western New Guinea, Maluku (particularly Ambon), and Sulawesi. The presence of Muslims in these regions is in part a result of the transmigrasi program of population re-distribution. Conflicts have often occurred because of the aims of radical Islamist organizations such as Jemaah Islamiah or Laskar Jihad to impose Sharia.
Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old Afghan citizen, was charged in Afghanistan with rejecting Islam (apostasy), a crime punishable by death under Sharia law. He has since been released into exile in the West under intense pressure from Western governments.
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
The kidnapping of Christian girls by Muslim Arabs and Kurds in Iraq in the last few years -- and the suicide of at least one Assyrian girl following rape by her Kurdish master -- is a subject that can be found discussed at Assyrian websites. None of this has been reported in the Western press.
This is not strange. The world press simply has not bothered to study Islam; as a consequence, it usually ends up offering “mere” reportage which does not delve, does not comprehend, and repeats the latest Arab or Muslim propaganda and shuns matter which might call into question the Muslim-friendly view of things.
Take, for example, the coverage of the “Palestinian” conflict with Israel --* that is to say, the Arab Jihad against Israel, where the local Arabs renamed themselves post-1967 the “Palestinian people,” and with a little help from Edward Said and a cast of thousands made everyone forget that 1) Jews in Israel came from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, where for more than a millennium and a half they were cruelly mistreated as dhimmis (and in some places, such as Yemen, as chattel slaves) * and not only from Europe. 2) that more than 90% of the land of what became Mandatory Palestine was owned by the Ottoman state, and then passed to the successor authorities, first the government of Mandatory Palestine, and then to the state of Israel. The small amount that was privately owned was bought and paid for by the Jewish National Fund, and other Samaritan organizations, often at exceedingly high costs, from absentee Arab landlords * not a single dunam of land was taken until the 1948 attack on the nascent Jewish state by five Arab armies. 3) the ruin and desolation in the area, which Edward Said so monstrously mocked, was a fact testified to by the very people whom he claimed stood for the opposite principle * from Lamartine and Chateaubriand to Melville and Mark Twain. 4) the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya is the immutable principle of all Muslim treaties with Infidels, yet not a single reporter has ever managed to allude to this treaty, much less to show that any research --* such as a reading of Majid Khadduri --* has gone into an understanding of the Muslim Law of War and Peace.
Now we come to the discussion of Christians. It was quite something to observe the evident want not only of sympathy, but of any understanding, of what the Maronites and other Christians were facing in Lebanon. They were consistently described as “right-wing” Christians, though that epithet was meaningless. What made Christian farmers and peasants in Damour, massacred by the hundreds, into “right-wingers”? Nothing at all, except that the Homeric epithet is used as an all-purpose damning device by a credulous press. And as for the Copts in Egypt, who bothered, under the reign of Saint Sadat (my, how quickly he passed, and his phony sainthood with him, but not before the Sinai was completely pocketed by Egypt in exchange for * nothing), to note the self-imposed internal exile of Pope Shenouda? Copts in Egypt are persecuted; many of them, of course, parrot the Muslim Arab line about other quasi-dhimmi communities * i.e. the Jews of Israel * which has been, as Bat Ye’or said, a consistent pattern among the various dhimmi communities that, instead of identifying with and helping each other, each tried to strike a separate deal with the Muslim overlords who terrorized them (so much for the “protected peoples” idea).
And if the treatment of the Maronites in the world press was bad, and that of the Copts nearly as bad, so is that of the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians. They are the true indigenes, the descendants of those who were in Mesopotamia long before the Muslim Arabs arrived in small numbers, but nevertheless relentlessly managed to Islamize and to Arabize, non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples. The remnant that managed to survive is now being marginalized -- whether under Saddam’s direct rule or Sistani’s indirect rule hardly matters, for the key to the marginalization of all these indigenous Christian groups is Islam.
And the Kurds, themselves victims of Arab Muslims, have been painted in the American press as worthy of our sympathy and support. So they are, but less out of sentimental reasons, and more out of the cold calculation that a free Kurdistan will weaken various states *-- Iraq, Iran, Syria, and even Turkey, if it does not behave itself in less Erdoganish a fashion (for America, too, can be fickle with its allegiances, and should begin to make clear that none of these so-called Muslim allies is an ally, but rather, a possible source of short term support and cooperation, and nothing more) * and would also, merely by coming into existence, heighten the awareness that the so-called “Arab world” has a large number of minorities, either non-Muslim or non-Arab Muslim, that deserve sovereign states of their own. Lebanon, if put back, should once again become the focal point of Christian interest. Israel needs to be kept from Roadmap-assisted suicide (aided and abetted by the senile dementia, or at least crazed obstinacy, of Sharon). And an independent Kurdistan might give Berbers in North Africa the kind of ideas that Kateb Yacine, who hated the forced islamization and cultural oppression of the Berbers, thought they should entertain.
In the reports from Iraq about the treatment of Christians, aside from bombings of churches (that cannot be overlooked), the much more widespread, and insidious anti-Christian acts (there are no Jews to string up any more, as in the June 1-2, 1941 Farhud or Pogrom --* see Naim Kattan’s memoir --* or in the last show-hanging of “Zionist spies” early in Saddam Hussein’s regime, a hanging to which half-a-million delighted Iraqs came, in order to enjoy the spectacle), all over, from those Shi’a some (such as Stephen Schwartz) believe are so very meek and mild, and nothing to worry about (this would come as a surprise to many in the Islamic Republic of Iran), and who are currently praised because they went and cast their ballots for “democracy” (actually, they cast their ballots for something quite different -- in order to obtain power; had they been 20% of the population, they would have bitterly opposed the elections), who have watched Christian businessmen be assassinated in Basra, or in the Sunni isosceles or more accurately scalene triangle, where the last eight Christian families living in Ramadi saw the men killed, the women seized, the children forcibly Islamized (all with American army troops within rescue distance), or in the Kurdish territories.
One is now in the habit of exaggerating the wonderfulness of the Kurds, simply because they were victims of Saddam Hussein, and because they have been, for good and sufficient reasons of their own, much more favorably disposed towards the American effort. Indeed, American soldiers in Iraq often in the last two years have taken to referring to “the Iraqis” and “the Kurds” as if the former were the enemy, and the latter our trusted friends. Quasi-trusted, semi-friends.
Behavior over a long period of time, sufficiently consistent, and having been prompted by impulses that have not changed (Islamic tenets have not changed) may be a reasonable guide to present and future behavior. The behavior of the Muslim Kurds toward non-Muslims has been, over time, sufficiently consistent, and prompted by the same Muslim doctrines that have caused Jihad-conquest and the imposition of dhimmitude to be so similar in time and space, over 1300 years (or perhaps a little less, as Islam likely got its start not in the 7th but rather in the 8th or even early 9th centuries, as is now becoming apparent from Western scholarly efforts).
As is well known, the European powers attempted to force the Ottoman government to begin treating its non-Muslim populations with decency. That government proved most reluctant to do so, and again and again European pressure had to be brought to bear long after the famous Tanzimat "reforms" were initially declared. In the meantime, the Muslim masses were happy to engage in the massacres and rapine which punctuated this period "reform."
And those Muslims were not only Turks, or Arabs. Kurds were among them. The victims were Maronites, Armenians, asin the case of the attacks on Christians in Damascus in 1860 (which led the Christians, in turn, to attack not the Muslims who had been murdering them, but the the entirely inoffensive community of Jews -- simply because the latter could not fight back) or in the 1869 attacks on Armenians. For the latter, see pp. 281 ff. of Bat Ye'or’s The Dhimmi, which offers a number of reports from Western diplomats, travellers, and missionaries, detailing as one eyewitness noted, “the abject terror the Koords have driven into the Christians."
The 1869 massacre of Armenians and of other Christians (chiefly Maronites, who were not limited to Lebanon) by Kurds, was followed in 1894-96 by the massacres of Armenians that served as a kind of prelude to the 1915-1922 genocide. Eyewitness accounts by American missionaries testify to the “leadership role” (as business schools like to call it) of the Kurds in this massacre, as a number of such books appeared brimful of such collections of American outrage in the 1890s. In the later genocide, Kurds took part enthusiastically * and why not? It was a war not of Turk against Armenian, but of Muslim against “giavour,” which is why the Turks could, if they wish, blame the promptings of “fanatical Islam” which, they could (falsely) claim, is no longer observed in Turkey. But they can’t; they won’t; Islam can never be disowned, not in the slightest, by Believers.
As is well known, many of the Jews in the Middle East endured the status of virtual slavery, chattel slaves who could be killed at will (see R. S. Serjeant’s articles, which discuss Yemeni Jews even into the 1950s, and Serjeant was, remarkably, an apologist for Islam, as his subsequent attack on Crone and Cook’s Hagarism makes clear). But in Kurdistan, too, the Jews lived as virtual slaves. differently than they now do, after centuries of Islam. But how many are aware that the so-called “Kurdish Jews” were in fact simply Jews who were owned as slaves by Kurdish masters, and whose lives, and property, were disposed of virtually at will.
American soldiers and officials in Iraq may be aware that the Iraqi Christians, both Chaldeans and Assyrians and Armenians, have to be extremely careful what they say and what they do. While Saddam Hussein was in power, his household staff, including his food-tasters, were largely comprised of Christians who have fulfilled the same function for American officials in the Green Zone. He did this not because he was a wise and tolerant man, but because he was cunning, and knew that alone of all the groups in Iraq, it was the Christians who were most helpless, and would be no threat to his regime * they needed him, he did not need them. No doubt the Iraqi Christians, as dhimmis, will continue to be craven in the protective mimicry of some of the attitudes they adopt (noe, for example, within Iraq, will dare to demonstrate any sense that their treatment, as dhimmis, has something to do with the implacable hostility of Arab Muslims to the non-Muslim sovereign state of Israel * how could they, after all?).
But the American soliders in Iraq were more fully informed about the historic persecution of non-Muslims, by Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Kurds alike, they might be more keenly aware of the need to make sure that such things as the preventing of Assyrian voting were strongly protested, and those guilty made to suffer. The Kurds, at the moment, may think that in American eyes they can do no wrong * and so are prepared to get away with murder. They have to have another think coming. Soon enough the momentary triumph of the election will be put into perspective; the jostling for power begin, and the whole business of “democracy” as the key to Infidel self-defense be seen as the naïve business it is, even if it is promoted by someone as admirable as Natan Sharansky (whose experience, and knowledge, are of Communism, and who knows nothing of the very different history of Jihad-conquest and dhimmitude), whose views have apparently had a big influence on the impressionable President.
Would that instead of Sharansky’s book, Bat Ye’or’s The Dhimmi or The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam or Eurabia could be sent to the Bush Book Club, as described in today’s New York Times. It would do some good, and get us out of Iraq faster, for then the full extent of the problem, which “democracy” will not alleviate and may even worsen, would lead to a more thoughtful and cunning deployment of anti-Jihad resources around the world.
- Hugh Fitzgerald
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
'Currently, Palestine's Christian community hovers between two and 10 percent.
In Gaza, approximately 3,000 Christians still call this territory home -- with the majority of the community living within Gaza City near the three main churches: the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Gaza Baptist.
Christians in Gaza have the same rights as their Muslim neighbors, rights guaranteed under the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Within the Legislative Council, several seats have been reserved for Christian leaders.
Seventeen-year-old Christian student Ali al-Jeldah told IPS about attending a dual faith school: "My life is normal and I've never felt oppressed. Being Muslim or Christian is never an issue."
"I have many Muslim friends. We hang out and study together with no differences at all," Al Jeldah said.
Lelias Ali, a 16-year-old Muslim student at Holy Family School, concurs. "We have a unity of struggle, a unity of aim -- to live under the same circumstances. This land is for both of us and being a Christian or Muslim should not separate us," she said.
"I have lots of friends. Being Muslim or Christian is not an issue," Diana al-Sadi, a 17-year-old student told IPS.
"I go to my friends' homes for happy and sad occasions," al-Sadi said, "including Christmas and Easter. They visit mine during Eid [the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan]."
When the students were asked if Christians are being harassed by Hamas or the Palestinian police, all agreed that this was not the case.
"Every society has extremists," Lelias Ali states. "Sometimes I'm criticized for not wearing my hijab [headscarf]. But that has nothing to do with being Muslim or Christian. Those people don't represent our Palestinian society."
Pausing for a moment, she considered the assertions in the international media regarding Muslims and Christians: "We should not let such ideas sneak into our minds. If we don't unite, then we lose."
Asked if Christians in Gaza feel singled out or oppressed, Musallam says, "Palestinian Christians are not a religious community set apart in some corner. They are part of the Palestinian people."
But what of Hamas, an Islamic political organization? Have Palestinian Christians experienced persecution or racism under their leadership, as Western papers insinuate?
"Our relationship with Hamas is as people of one nation," Musallam contends. "Hamas doesn't fight religious groups. Its fight is against the Israeli occupation.
And what of the Western media assertions that Gaza's Christians are considering emigrating because of Islamic oppression?
Sighing, Musallam corrects the misconception. "If Christians emigrate," he states resolutely, "It's not because of Muslims. It is because we suffer from Israeli siege. We seek a life of freedom. A life different from the life of the dogs we are currently forced to live."
*cough* BULLSHIT!!
Palestinian state means more Palestinians...perhaps even Palestinian immigration.. :eeK: :eek:
That's like saying "I hope I get cancer" for the Zionists.
Gotta see it clearly here....hehe
actually... not funny.... it could be a bigger problem.
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
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Of course the Glasgow study shows the media to be unbiased. Our studies show we're unbiased too lol. I can admit our media is very biased and there's no doubt about it but I find it odd for you to be in denial about your own. C’mon Byrnzie I know you’re smarter than that which is why I responded to your post in the first place.
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/critiques/Dishonest_Reporting_Award_for_2002.asp
==== BBC ====
Last year's winner of the Dishonest Reporting Award received a slew of nominations again this year. Members particularly criticized B BC for being caught altering a quote by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, substituting the word "terror" with the word "violence" in reference to Palestinians. Does BBC still believe that terror only occurs in the British Isles?
== IGNOBLE AWARD WINNER ==
And now for the winner of the Dishonest Reporting Award 2002. A huge number of nominations expressed alarm over media coverage of the Jenin battle in April. Most notably, the British media reported "facts" of IDF massacres, atrocities, summary executions, and mass graves -- which in the end were shown by United Nations and Human Rights Watch reports to have been fabricated by overzealous Palestinian "witnesses."
Here are a few examples of how the British media reported on Jenin:
"We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide..." -- London Evening Standard
"Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." -- The Times of London
Israel's actions in Jenin were "every bit as repellent" as Osama Bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11. -- The Guardian
"Hundreds of victims 'were buried by bulldozer in mass grave'." -- Daily Telegraph
Why the overzealous reaction based on spurious evidence?
Alon Ben-David, a veteran military correspondent for the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (and currently at Harvard), told UPI: "A large part of the European media regards itself as not just reporters but as ideological crusaders. They are in the business of journalism not just for the business. They want to do good in the world. They have agendas."
Looking back, the alarmist Jenin coverage has impacted the Mideast conflict in three key respects:
1) Palestinian Mythology
By allowing unfounded rumors to be reported as factual, the media has helped create a false Palestinian mythology over the battle of Jenin: i.e. the few fought the many and bravely chose to die in battle rather than surrender. Just as plenty of people are willing to believe that the Israeli Mossad was somehow behind September 11, plenty are willing to believe that the IDF got away with murder in Jenin, too.
This slipshod coverage adds fuel to the fire of those who falsely accuse the IDF of using excessive force. In reality, by using ground troops instead of an aerial assault, IDF troops put themselves in danger in order to spare Palestinian casualties -- and lost 23 soldiers in Jenin.
Since these myths are now part of Palestinian lore, true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians becomes more difficult. Palestinians will resurrect and spuriously compare Jenin to Sabra and Shatilla (where Christian Phalangists indeed massacred hundreds of Palestinian refugees), proving how poor media coverage of can further widen the Israeli-Palestinian gulf.
* * *
2) Residual References
Even after the allegations of a "massacre" were proven false, some of the media can't seem to let go. In August, Peter Cave of Australia's ABC insisted:
"I personally saw 30 Palestinian corpses at the hospital on April the 20th, and with dozens of other foreign reporters, watched them being buried at a mass grave just up the road from the hospital... Just as in Tiananmen Square, the power of the gun and the tank ensured there was no proper body count or accounting. Just as happened in Tiananmen Square, the uninformed and those with their own agenda, are now claiming there was no massacre. There was a massacre, a considerable number of human beings were indiscriminately and unnecessarily slaughtered..."
The media continues to trump up the Jenin charges in other ways. In November, when former IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz was appointed Defense Minister, BBC reported that Mofaz "directed some of Israel's most controversial operations in the West Bank earlier this year, including Jenin -- where Palestinians claim a massacre took place -- and Ramallah."
After HonestReporting complaints, BBC subsequently changed the wording to "Jenin -- where a Palestinian refugee camp was all but demolished..." This, too, is biased wording, as fighting only took place in a 200-square-meter area -- about 6% of the total area of the camp.
* * *
3) Credibility of Palestinian Spokesmen
HonestReporting has encouraged the media to challenge specious and inaccurate claims made by Palestinian spokesmen, particularly the charges of massacres. On April 14, Saeb Erekat was challenged by CNN's Bill Hemmer: "You said specifically, and others said 500 in Jenin... Where are you getting evidence that shows 500 people were killed there? ...If [Israel's] numbers are right and your initial numbers are wrong, will you come back here on our network and retract what you said?"
Erekat: "Absolutely."
(We're still waiting.)
With so many Palestinian spokesmen issuing false accusations about Jenin, this calls into question the general advisability of the media relying on Palestinian claims.
In April, Palestinian spokesman Nabil Sha'ath went on CNN to report that 30 Palestinian women died in labor at Israeli checkpoints. The canard joins other Palestinian claims of Israel using radioactive ammunition, Nazi tactics, and nerve gas, along with the charges that Jewish settlers tortured Palestinians (though investigations later revealed they had actually died in traffic accidents or were executed by Palestinians as "collaborators").
Also in April, Palestinian spokesmen claimed that documents confiscated from Arafat's compound in Ramallah, detailing Arafat's senior advisors' involvement in suicide bombings and terrorism, were fraudulent forgeries. Abdel Rahman told CNN: "This is a fraud by the Israeli intelligence, sir. The Israelis have a department that specializes in putting out lies." And Nasser Al-Kidwa (Palestinian representative to the UN) told CNN: "...some kind of James Bond activities... bits and pieces of rumors and unsubstantiated claims."
If Palestinian spokespeople repeatedly use the media as a platform to promote outright lies, doesn't the media have a responsibility to ban that spokesperson, and to generally be wary of unquestionably swallowing Palestinian claims?
* * *
It may take years for the Jenin dust to settle. But one thing we have learned: The British media will not hesitate to promote a biased anti-Israel agenda, whether or not the facts are there to back it up.
We recall how the global chorus of condemnation prompted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to call on Israel on to halt its military operations. "Can the whole world be wrong?" he asked.
In fact, the whole world was wrong. Phil Reeves of The Independent, known as a frequent critic of Israel, wrote of Jenin: "Even journalists have to admit they're wrong sometimes."
But it was too little, too late. The damage had been done. And for that, the British media deserves the Dishonest Reporting Award 2002.
...
Want more
There's is so much conflicting information on the internet it's hard to decide what to believe as I don't know if the above is correct either.
Violence and behind-the-scenes persecution are contributing to a mass exodus of Christians from the Palestinian territories
(July 30, 2007) – Arab Christians are leaving the Palestinian territories in droves due to discrimination and persecution from a Muslim-dominant police force and government, Dr. Justus Weiner, a distinguished scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told reporters and academics at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. on July 17.
“For a number of years now, this minority community [of Christians] has been in dire need of assistance,” he said. “Palestinian Christians are unable to practice their religion in freedom and in peace.
“Most in danger are Arab Christians. And most in danger among Arab Christians are those who have converted from Islam. They are often left defenseless against cruelty from Muslim fundamentalists.”
Weiner, an internationally recognized human rights lawyer, began advocating for Palestinian Christians nine years ago, after being surprised to discover that a problem even existed. He learned that “systematic persecution” was being met with total silence by most of the developed world, including human rights groups.
Due to the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, Weiner pointed out that the city of Bethlehem, which in 1948 was nearly 80 percent Christian, is today barely 12 percent. He also noted that Christians make up less than 2 percent of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They’re practically at the point of disappearing—nobody denies this,” he said.
Weiner cited several specific examples of persecution, including an Armenian Christian jeweler arrested without cause and beaten for eight hours in a Palestinian police station.
Another case involved a 16-year-old girl from Bethlehem who was kidnapped by a 23-year-old Muslim man who told police she had willingly eloped. High-level diplomacy secured the Christian girl’s release, but only because she was an American citizen.
Human rights violations against Palestinian Christians, according to Weiner, also include: individual loss of job or property; firebombed churches; destruction of Christian-based centers; beatings; torture; forced marriages; sexual harassment; and extortion.
He noted that most of the persecution has taken place since the empowerment of the Palestinian Authority in 1995 under Yasser Arafat. He described the torture suffered by Christian converts from Islam since then as “the kind of thing you only read about in Medieval books—it’s very difficult to describe.”
Anti-Christian violence made international news last month when a Catholic convent was ransacked and desecrated during Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza, according to the Associated Press (AP). The incident touched off fresh fear among Gaza’s Christian community, which numbers 3,000 compared with 1.4 million Muslims.
Because of the work of lawyers like Weiner, other human rights activists are increasingly sounding an alarm in the international community to wake up the world to the plight of Arab Christians throughout the Middle East. Analysts estimate as much as half of Iraq’s Christians have left the country.
At a “Save the Christians” rally in Rome earlier this month, the AP reported several hundred people gathered to demand an end to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. In addition to top Vatican officials and Italy’s former Premier Berlusconi, a prominent Jewish activist from the U.S. also attended.
“I stand here tonight as an American Jew and as a survivor of the Holocaust to say to you that ‘never again’ was a pledge that the Jewish people learned with great pain and sadness,” said Abraham Foxman, U.S. director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But ‘never again’ is not limited to Jewish pain and suffering…I pledge to you that our voices will be heard whenever Christians are discriminated against.”
- Paul Steven Ghiringhelli
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
Ok...ill take every instance of violence against muslims after 9/11 and post them on here and generalize it as Christian Crimes against muslims. There are cases of violence against any religion, im sure you're capable of googling crimes against muslims. The picture i posted was Christmas in Iran. According to your post Christians are persecuted or executed....so the that shop is just a trap to draw in Christians?
You post pictures of Christmas in Iran, as if Iran was this incredibly tolerant nation. Next, will you be posting pictures of a Gay Pride Parade in Tehran? Oh yeah, there are no gays in Iran.
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
No. The Glasgow study shows the media to be biased, not unbiased.
As for the article you posted a link to; I notice that that website - 'Honest reporting' - it's nothing of the sort. The site is dedicated to attacking anyone and everyone who makes any sort of criticism of Israeli policies or atrocities:
'It was Yom Kippur, 2000. The Intifada had just broken out and a huge wave of terror had suddenly descended upon Israel. The media in Europe was twisting the story to brand Israel as a bad guy! Jews in the UK were in shock and felt under attack. A few idealists decided enough was enough.'
I notice that both John Pilger, and Jonathan Hari - recently nominated for a journalist of the year award - both come under attack for criticizing Israel.
Basically, the website is a fucking joke.
Just as you speak of Israel and claim it is tolerant? Things come full circle huh?
On a more serious note, page 17 pretty much describes the increase in Palestinian sympathy with the increase in media coverage in 5 European countries in this study.
http://www.adl.org/anti_semitism/european_attitudes.pdf
I have to find where I read about the overpopulation problem but that could have been over estimated. My computer keeps locking up :(
No response for blaming Britain though lol. I just put that in there because the US government gets blamed for everything lol.
Sounds like some Christian conservatives I know in denial...hehe
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
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http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9126.shtml
'...But what of Hamas, an Islamic political organization? Have Palestinian Christians experienced persecution or racism under their leadership, as Western papers insinuate?
"Our relationship with Hamas is as people of one nation," Musallam contends. "Hamas doesn't fight religious groups. Its fight is against the Israeli occupation.
And what of the Western media assertions that Gaza's Christians are considering emigrating because of Islamic oppression?
Sighing, Musallam corrects the misconception. "If Christians emigrate," he states resolutely, "It's not because of Muslims. It is because we suffer from Israeli siege. We seek a life of freedom. A life different from the life of the dogs we are currently forced to live."
Yes, Israel is a LOT more tolerant than Iran. Only a complete fool would think Iran is more tolerant.
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
I agree with you there.
www.wm3.org
Ron Paul 2012
I can't be bothered to download and read this pdf file so I'll just take your word for it that Palestinians are grateful for an alleged increase in media coverage of their plight.
O.k. So how does any of this relate to the subject of the occupation and the ongoing crimes against humanity and other breaches of the Geneva convention being committed by Israel?
Or are we going to continue attempting to muddy the water with these irrelevancies?
Right biased for Israel lol.
Yeah I know that's what the
BTW searching the Internet is terrible you read one thing and then you read the exact opposite.
If it's not the media influencing Europeans to sympathize with the Palestinians my internet searching basically comes up with Europeans have been anti-semitic for a long long time and continue to be the same. I'm not going to post the links because I think that's ridiculous and refuse to believe it. I rather blame the media lol.
How many peoples/countries are occupying lands that don't "belong" to them? I guess going back in history pretty much every race, nationality or group of people are guilty of this. And Israelis aren't the only ones guilty of this right now.
Yeah, there's plenty of nonsense to be found on the internet. This is why it helps to stick to the facts. They're not hard to find. Like I said above, people love to try and complicate this issue. But it's not complicated. It'd be interesting to study Western media reporting of South African Apartheid and make some comparisons. I'm sure you'd find some interesting analogies.
Maybe. But that doesn't make them right. But by all means we can all revert back to living like barbarians if that's what you wish?
http://www.occupation101.org/
You can download it here..
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3759278/Occupation_101_-_Palestine-Israel_Mideast_Conflict_%5BDVD%5D_%5BENG%5D