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Christian, Islam violence spreading
Europe and the Islamic world are at war. It’s a proxy conflict, fought in European capitals and on the Arab streets. But people are being killed.
Just last week, Islamic gunmen slaughtered six Christians as they left church in southern Egypt on Coptic Christmas Eve, setting off a week of retributive violence. This was just the latest incident in a cascading series of repressive and violent acts against Christians living in numerous Arab states, including the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Morocco, among other places.
Meantime, across Europe, government leaders are contemplating or enacting ever more repressive rules on Muslim residents and citizens who are carrying their lifestyles and grievances into unforgiving societies.
The most famous example, last month: the Swiss electorate voted to ban the construction of new Minarets. Then early this month a fiery Islamic cleric in England announced that he would organize a large protest march through the streets of a town near London that regularly honors passing hearses carrying British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “personally appalled,” and then on Tuesday Britain banned the group.
Misunderstanding
In both worlds, the conflicts result from misunderstanding and outright intolerance, fanned oftentimes by extremists, like Geert Wilders, a Dutch member of parliament. He travels the Western world preaching an anti-Islamic screed. Wilders has hit a chord, and the transcript of one speech he gave in New York last year has gone viral, landing in millions of e-mail in-boxes and watched on YouTube nearly 1 million times.
Wilders likes to note that “it is not a coincidence that every terrorist act is based on this fascist book the Koran, this wrong ideology, and unfortunately has been done by people from the Islamic world. I don’t believe that cultures are equal. I believe that our culture is much better than the retarded Islamic culture.”
In England, meanwhile, Anjem Choudary, leader of that Islamic group, posted his view on his organization’s Web site last week, saying the march (now cancelled) would be in honor of “the real war dead who have been shunned by the Western media and general public as they were, and continue to be, horrifically murdered in the name of democracy and freedom: the innocent Muslim man, women and children.”
An estimated 20 million Muslims now live in Europe. Many emigrated to take menial jobs that Europeans were no longer willing to do. The problem for Europeans is that these immigrants tend not to assimilate. They live in their own communities where their leaders enforce elements of Sharia law.
In some major cities, including Amsterdam and Marseille, they now comprise 25 percent of the population, and the anti-Islamists decry an alarmingly high birthrate among the Muslim residents, though the statistics are questionable at best. But all of that is engendering panicked talk about the possible death of European civilization.
Western religion
No one can say with any certainty what drives the rash of assaults and murders of Arab Christians in several Arab states. But for many Muslims, Christianity is a western religion, though it was born in the Middle East. I am guessing that some Arabs see their Christian neighbors as proxies for their grievances with the West — including the way Muslims are treated in Europe and the United States.
Thousands of Christian families have lived in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, since the faith was born. In the mid-20th century, 80 percent of the town’s population was Christian. But in recent years, murders, fire bombings and constant, brutal intimidation has driven most of the Christians away. Now they represent just 20 percent of the population.
Mosul, Iraq, has among the oldest Christian populations in the world. The Syrian Orthodox Church of St. Thomas, built in 770, was damaged in a bombing last month. That was the sixth attack on Christians there in less than a month, the New York Times reported.
On both continents, anger is rising; the conflicts are growing more frequent and violent. Thanks to extremists on both sides, I don’t see a good end.
X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.