Radical Muslims Murdering Christians

By Peter Hoekstra

I met her in a small church in Turkmenistan. She was frightened and thought she was being followed. I met another in the slums of Cairo who was engaged in phenomenal work to educate poor children.

I wanted to visit others in Iraq but the U.S. military couldn’t guarantee my safety. It was just too risky. These people had one thing in common: They were all non-Muslims living in Muslim lands who were afraid for their personal safety. They are Coptic Christians, Chaldean Christians, Jews, and other minority religions living in fear because violent Islamic fundamentalists have declared war on them throughout the Middle East.

This focused effort by radical Islamists against religious minorities, specifically Christians, is real. The evidence is overwhelming. International Christian Concern, a human rights organization, recently released its “Hall of Shame” on global persecution of religious minorities and identified Islamic fundamentalists as the No. 1 persecutor of Christians, besting other notorious oppressors such as China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Egypt and Iraq were recently added to the list of countries with the highest levels of persecution joining countries like Iran, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Islamic majority countries are not only quickly moving up the list, they have begun to dominate it.

In late October, violent Islamic extremists brutally murdered more than 50 people inside a cathedral in Baghdad.

The following day, al-Qaida declared Christians throughout the Middle East to be legitimate targets of the Mujahedeen. On New Year’s Day in Alexandria, Egypt, 23 people were killed outside a Coptic church.

Shortly thereafter, the Shumukh-al-Islam al-Qaida website published pictures, names, and addresses of Coptic churches around the world.

On Christmas Eve, dozens were killed and more than 100 injured in an attack on Christians in Nigeria. On Jan. 4, 2011, Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was brutally murdered by a bodyguard. His offense? He dared to speak out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws that are being used to persecute minority religions in Pakistan.

The trend is clear and frightening.

Where is the international outrage? The Western news media could not contain itself over supposed bias against U.S. Muslims last fall due to popular opposition to the building of the ground zero mosque in Manhattan.

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