What is Christianphobia?

Hugh Fitzgerald, A Director at JihadWatch Tells Us.

We hear constant complaints and lamentations about Isalmophobia and what Muslims are going through and how they are being "discriminated against" under current Western governments. Is anyone giving a thought to past and current Christian travails and the discriminatory practices of past and current Muslim governments? Here is Hugh's take on the situation:

Twenty Points for Archibishop Lajolo:

1) If "the war on terrorism is seen linked to Western political strategy" and that this is responsible for "Christianphobia," then what explains the attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh in Kashimir? Or on Buddhists in Thailand, and the Bamiyan Buddhas -- the people and the artifacts -- in southern Thailand?

Is this because Hindu (and Sikh) and Buddhist villages and artifacts have also been linked "to Western political strategy"? And if they are so linked, how was it possible to link them, when 60-70 million Hindus were killed, over 250 years, according to the testimony not only of Hindus, but of complacent Muslim observers -- just read the "Rihla" of Ibn Battuta, as he calmly notes the mass enslavement of surviving Hindu villagers? At the time the United States, that center for "anti-terrorism," did not exist.

2) If "Christianphobia" is merely a result of the modern "war on terror" then what shall we make of the treatment of the Copts in Egypt over the past, say, 1300 years? Was it something they said or did that led to their slow and murderous asphyxiation, so that they have been reduced from being the entire population of Egypt, to about 10% of that population? And if the "war on terror" which has been linked "to Western political strategy" began, say, a few years ago, then what explains the murder of close to 100,000 Assyrian Christians, beginning within a year after the British soldiers left Iraq in 1932?

3) If "Christianphobia" is a recent phenomenon, then what explains, over 1350 years, the attacks on Christians and Christian sites -- let's start with the fabled churches of Byzantium -- everywhere that Islam conquered?

4) How is it, if "Christianphobia" is a recent phenomenon, that the Christians of North Africa, from which came some of the most important Fathers of the Chruch, including St. Augustine and before him Tertullian, all disappeared over time, or were reduced to levels, and to a role – as non-Muslims – of insignificance, so that where Tertullian and St. Augustine had once walked, the last French and Italian monks, pursuing a purely charitable vocation, had their throats slit by members of F.I.S., the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria – years before that “war on terror” got started?

5) If “Christianphobia” originates in a reaction to the “war on terror” what explains the imprisonment and torture of foreign Christians, some for supposedly conducting Christian services, others for merely singing Christmas carols, over the past three decades (ever since foreign Christians were allowed in as workers) in Saudi Arabia? When English nurses sang Christmas carols and were punished for it in the 1970s, what connection did that have with a non-existent “war on terror”?

6) Why do the Christians of Ethiopia worry openly about the spread of Islam, and Islamic militancy, in their country? Are Ethiopians identified with the “Western war on terror”?

7) Why, ever since the founding of Pakistan, have Pakistani Christians been subject to assault and murder? Why did Archbishop John Joseph kill himself, years before the so-called “Western war on terror,” leaving a note that showed clearly he was protesting by his act the intolerable cruelty with which Christians were treated by Muslims in Pakistan?

8) Why, if it is the “linkage of “Christian West” to the “war on terror” that explains “Christianphobia” and not what can be found texts in Islam (Qur’an, hadith, and sira), have Indonesian Christians — 200,000 Christians in East Timor and Christians in the Moluccas, Sulawesia, and throughout the East Indian archipelago -- been subject to persecution and murder? Why were between 2,300 and 4,000 churches destroyed in Indonesia in the year 2003 alone, according to the British-based Barnabas Fund?

9) Why were hundreds of Maronite villagers in Damur, and thousands in other Christian villages, massacred by the Muslims in Lebanon in the 1970s? Was this a response to a non-existent “war on terror” that was supposedly linked to the West? Why does Habib Malik, why does Walid Phares, why does Franck Salameh, why do a hundred Maronite intellectuals and writers all deplore the misunderstanding of Islam in the West – and deeply resent the continuous efforts at appeasement by the Vatican in order to win some temporary reprieve not for Eastern Christians (the Copts, the Maronites, and others) but specifically for Roman Catholics?

10) The Vatican is seeing under its very eyes the first slow, now more rapid, Islamization of Europe. Does it care? What is it doing to rally the ranks of Believers? So far the most intelligent and brave opponents within Europe of that Islamization have not come from within the Vatican, but from the ranks of such traditional anti-clerics as Oriana Fallaci, who never fails to be as scathing on the Vatican as she is on the European left. Nor did Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh exactly strike a pious note – but of course, they had the luxury, you may say, of being able to tell the truth, while the Vatican has constantly to worry about the situation of the Christians in Arab lands. Never mind the Vatican’s general indifference to the Eastern Churches, including the Orthodox who have their own historic memory, and present experience, with the Jihad. Why is it that those who understand the situation perfectly, from within the Vatican, have not managed to take complete control of the response to what is now a mortal assault on Christian Europe? Why is this Archbishop Lajolo, despite Cardinals Biffi and Ratzinger, Sandro Magister, and a good many others (including the Cardinals from black Africa, who know perfectly well what Islam is all about), still allowed to speak his appeasing piece – his “peace” that passeth understanding?

11) Do many in the Vatican think that the way to deal with Islam is through concessions and negotiations — despite the fact that Islam is a belief-system whose adherents do not understand or respond in the slightest to any concession or yielding on the part of Islam’s opponents, except to take such yielding as a sign of weakness, and to make use of any temporary “truce” or hudna only to prepare for the next assault – because there can be no permanent peace between Islam and Infidels? A permanent peace simply cannot be permitted.

12) Has the Vatican’s appeasement of Islam made things easier, in the end, for Christians worldwide? Has its defense of Arafat made, for example, the position of Christians – who in the last few years have fled from the P.A. so that where once 20% of “Palestinian” Arabs were Christian, that number is now down to 2% (fleeing not only to the West, but to Israel as well: an Israeli residence card is the most sought-after document by “Palestinian” Christians) – any easier?

13) How does the Vatican regard the refusal, led by France and Belgium, to recognize the “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian” roots of Europe? As a temporary aberration? As something that required worried inquiry? And what does the Vatican think of attempts by the likes of Tariq Ramadan, aided by such Western “scholars” of Islam, to exaggerate beyond parody the “contribution” of Islam to Western civilization? What does the Vatican think of Romano Prodi’s address at the Library of Alexandria, offering Europe’s “services” to the Arabs, and specifically to a regime that permits and even encourages the continued persecution of the Copts (with the Egyptian legal code expressly taking the Shari’a as its model)?

14) Now that 1 out of every 3 babies born in France is Muslim, how does the Vatican see its continued influence in Europe? Does it think that constant appeasement of the Arabs has, as a strategy – leaving aside the moral idiocy of it all – has worked? How is Europe, formerly Christian Europe, doing in the little task of protecting its own legacy, created over centuries, by those who would no doubt be aghast at the cravenness of their descendants? Is Europe doing fine, so-so, or not fine at all? Check one.

15) How, with all the appeasement that the Vatican has offered over the years, are the Christians of the Middle East doing? Where are they safest, and best protected? Could it be that the answer is “Israel,” a country which the Vatican has in many ways, in its promotion of the Jihad that is disguised as “Palestinian” nationalism, done so much to harm? And if Israel were to be pushed back still further (or, in its own demoralized and confused state, voluntarily retreat to the pre-1967 lines, which were not borders, but simply the armistice lines recognized in 1949), would this make things better, calm things down, make the Muslims give up their Jihad against Israel as an Infidel sovereignty? Or would it, after the passage of a year or three, simply start all over again, a relentless assault with a now-strategically hopeless position for the hapless Israelis?

16) And leaving aside the little matter of morality, that thing called by some the Holocaust, the centuries of persecution and forced conversion and murder of Jews in Western Christendom, which are not erased by an apology or two, what will happen when Muslims again control the Holy Land? What do you envision, in the Vatican, will be the situation of free Christian access to these sites? What was it like before Israel, in the centuries before the Western world could impose its will on a decrepit Ottoman Empire?

17) And what will happen, in the end, to those who within the Vatican have counseled appeasement and tried to inveigle others, Catholics and other Christians, into parroting that appeasement? At what point will the folly of these willful misunderstandings and misstatements become clear – just as clear as they are now to all the far-sighted who come to this website? Will there be any consequences for those who have been so damagingly interested in pretending that appeasement has worked, just as those outside the Vatican (Solana, Chirac, Patten) wish us to believe – credunt quia absurdum – in their policies, and their own power and significance, as long as they can?

18) If the “war on terror” is the cause of Muslim hatred of Christians (“Christianphobia”) then one wishes to understand whether Archbishop Lajolo, or the Vatican itself for which he is naturally assumed to be speaking, believes this “war on terror” should end? Does it think, for example, that it was wrong to destroy the Al-Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan? Is it wrong to disarm Iraq – or would it be wrong to disarm any Muslim polity, for none one can be trusted with major arms? That might increase some local danger to local Christians – but so what? Is Western policy, helping to determine whether or not Western societies and peoples survive, to be permanently inhibited -- so that the condition of those Christians held hostage in Muslim societies remains permanently insecure?

Surely it is more important to draw the right lesson: that we do not approve or accept the slightest extension in size of that Muslim world, or the slightest increase in Muslim power. For wherever that Muslim power goes, non-Muslims within dar al-Islam live in permanent thrall to the threats of Muslims – and surely no one knows this better than Archbishop Lajolo and all those who, in their appeasement, reveal just how keenly aware they are that Muslims are quick to scapegoat, to threaten, and to carry out threats against Christians (or any and all non-Muslims) when they feel their wars on behalf of Islam are being responded to, not in kind (for no non-Muslim power has ever stooped to the methods now routinely being used, and applauded, by Muslims) but at least with a certain steadiness.

It is too bad that the Israelis for so many decades allowed themselves to be so inhibited in their responses. Had they allowed themselves – or been allowed by a tsk-tsking world – the Arabs and Muslims might have been taught a lesson, and claiming “darura,” (the doctrine of necessity), withdrawn at least temporarily to a more peaceful kind of behavior.

The Arabs and Muslims have never suffered the kind of injury that the American armed forces inflicted on Germany and Japan to hasten the end of World War II, including the reduction of Berlin and Tokyo to rubble. They therefore have a very unrealistic sense (based on the mild measures of tiny Israel, so concerned with its “purity of arms,”) of what can be done. Nothing like what could be done: Falluja, Baghdad, all of Iraq, indeed all of the Muslim Middle East, could be taken care of overnight. This has to be made clear, and understood. And in the same way, the Muslims within Europe have to understand that they should not be fooled by the sufferance of the long-suffering Infidels. At a certain point, when “civilized” behavior becomes suicidal and is widely recognized as such, it can be, quite properly, jettisoned.

19) If Muslims take out on local Christians their own fury at the Infidels daring – daring! –to act to defend themselves, that is regrettable. But Western policy cannot be held hostage to Arab Christians. As for the Christians – Arabic-speaking but not Arab – such as the Copts and the Maronites – well, they have been singularly unimpressed by the indifference of the Vatican to their permanent plight. France was once the protector of the Maronites; it abandoned that role, which was then assumed by Israel, and would still be Israel’s role if it were not constantly under assault by that “Christian” Europe which will, in the end, suffer whatever Israel suffers, and will, psychologically, be far more likely to undertake certain measures of civilizational self-defense if it had not, a decade or two before, so noisily condemned such measures if undertaken by Israel – such as some transfer of Arab populations from one side of the Jordan to the other, for reasons even more comprehensible than those which led the Czechs after World War II to expel 3 million ethnic Germans, and many other countries – Poland, Hungary, and so on – to undertake similar measures on a smaller scale.

20) Who in the Vatican has carefully read the Qur’an, the hadith, and sira? Who in the Vatican has read that indispensable history, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam” by Bat Ye’or? Who will read her forthcoming “Eurabia”? Who will understand that it is not Archbishop Lajolo, but Bat Ye'or and a few of her Vatican admirers, who have a better sense of what Islam is all about? Who will realize that it is not merely a “war on terror” but a war of self-defense against the Jihad, and that two of the most formidable instruments of Jihad are Da’wa (the Call to Islam) and demography (in this case, the overbreeding of Muslims wherever they are, and especially in Europe, where the Muslim birth-rate in some countries is five times the non-Muslim rate: 7 ½% versus 1 ½%. Do the math. Draw some lines. Figure it out.

Anyone making plans to ship the statuary in St. Peter’s across the ocean? Or all those paintings with Madonnnas? The Pieta alone would be quite a headache, to get it over to American shores, and safely in Kansas.

Who is in charge of long-range emergency planning at the Vatican? Time to get cracking. The mixture as before just won’t do.