The Unnamed Root Of Anti-Christian Violence And Its Link To Western Media

On Friday, mourners gathered at St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in a small village in Jordan’s Karak governorate to bury one of their own. Muslim gunmen stormed in and opened fire. Nine people are dead and nearly 40 are wounded, and one Christian survivor described people crawling for their lives while the attackers returned to fire into the dying. People who came to bury the dead became the dead. After the attack, the Muslims recorded a victory message: “Allahu Akbar, and glory to Allah. We have severely punished the Christians of Karak in vengeance for Islam and the Islamic State. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

Jordan’s government called the attack terrorism, declaring three days of national mourning. The UN and the EU condemned it. Investigators have not yet named the perpetrators, but Christians across the Middle East recognize this pattern the way a family recognizes a familiar knock at the door.

I lived much of my life in that region, and the script rarely changes. Armed Muslim men attack a Christian gathering. The minority community is left horrified and exposed. Then officials stage a ceremony of national unity, with Christian clergy and Muslim imams side by side, and declare that this will never divide us and that we are one people. It is theater. It comforts nobody who is burying a child, and it solves nothing, because it refuses to name the problem.

Yes, we should condemn the targeting of people for their faith, but the question that follows is one many commentators avoid: why does this violence flow so often in one direction? Why do Christians keep being the ones in the crosshairs?

Poverty and political grievance cannot be the whole story, as poor people in other parts of the world don’t routinely storm churches to massacre Christians, and political grievance does not explain why the targets are chosen particularly because of their religion.

We must point to the root: The literal application of the Quran and other Islamic texts that stigmatize non-Muslims as infidels and polytheists, thus making them legitimate targets for religious zealots seeking to please a deity and imitate whom they deem a prophet.

Start with the Quran. It instructs Muhammad, “O Prophet! Exhort the believers to fight,” commanding, “kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush” (9:5). These are two verses among many with the same thrust.

What do they have to do with Christians? The Quran erroneously condemns Jews and Christians for taking partners alongside God. So a Christian can be labeled kafir, an infidel, and mushrik, one who associates partners with God. These labels are exclusively Islamic, and they carry a stigma. In Muslim-majority societies, where that vocabulary is woven into sermons, textbooks, and street speech, the stigma becomes danger.

Worse, the Quran also warns Muslims against taking Jews and Christians as close allies and tells them that those who reject Muhammad are destined for hellfire.

A man who sincerely believes Allah has issued these verdicts finds it appealing to attack and massacre the “infidel.”

Now look beyond Jordan. In 2010, Muslim gunmen massacred worshippers at Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. In 2011, a bomb tore through a Coptic church in Alexandria at New Year’s; and on Palm Sunday 2017, bombers struck two Coptic churches in Egypt, killing dozens. In 2013, suicide bombers killed more than 100 at All Saints Church in Peshawar, and in 2016, a blast targeted Easter celebrants in a Lahore park. Muslim terrorists of Boko Haram have burned churches across northern Nigeria for years. In 2018, Muslims carried out suicide bombings at churches in Surabaya, Indonesia; and in 2019, Easter bombings in Sri Lanka killed more than 250.

These places differ in language, culture, ethnicity, and political system, but these attacks often share the vocabulary the perpetrators use: kafir, mushrik, jihad, martyrdom. When militants across continents speak the same religious language to justify the same acts, serious people should ask what role that language plays.

Here is the blind spot of Western media and public discourse. The reflex comes within hours of every such attack: this does not represent Islam, we are assured. These are not true Muslims, we are invited to believe. Many Westerners seem more eager to shield Islam from any association with the terrorists than to face the religious texts the attackers cite. Meanwhile, those of us who have watched Christians live under Islamic rule, at the mercy of its brutal treatment of minorities, know that this “not true Islam” line is not a conclusion drawn from history. It is a fanciful defense mechanism.

The cost is real. When the press refuses to examine the stated motivation, Christians who live under that poisonous creed become less safe, and policymakers cannot deal with what they will not name.

Even in the West, some Muslim clerics describe Christians as infidels to be fought, citing sources their followers treat as beyond question. Some listeners hear exactly what the clerics intend. And no matter how often Christians repeat that they worship one God and only one, some Muslims cannot see them any other way.

So here is the uncomfortable question we must ask: Are we overlooking the ideological foundations of anti-Christian persecution, and in doing so, failing to understand why it persists?

Until we answer it honestly, we will keep attending the same funerals.

***

A. S. Ibrahim holds two PhDs in Islamic Studies. He is the author of “Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom” and “Islam and the West.” He has also authored “Muhammad’s Military Expeditions” (Oxford, 2024), “A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad” (Baker Academic, 2022), “Conversion to Islam” (Oxford, 2021), “Basics of Arabic” (Zondervan, 2021), “A Concise Guide to the Quran” (Baker Academic, 2020), and “The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion” (Peter Lang, 2018), among others. Follow him on X: @al2ostaz

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org