Two Muslims Burn 14-Year-Old Christian Boy in Pakistan

Nuaman suffered burns covering more than 55 percent of his body.

Two local young Muslims going for Friday prayers to their mosque in Pakistan’s Lahore city beat up and set fire to a 14-year-old Christian boy after stopping him and asking his religious affiliation, according to a Christian group.

The victim, identified only as Nuaman, is being treated at Meo Hospital in Lahore in Punjab province, according to a Christian group, The Voice Society, in Pakistan. He has burns covering more than 55 percent of his body.

The Christian boy was coming from a tailor’s shop when he was attacked. It was time for Muslim prayers on Friday when the incident happened.

Two Muslims, who have not been identified, stopped him and asked what his religion was.

“I told them that I am Christian. They started beating me, when I tried running, both boys started following me through the street and then they threw Kerosene on me and burnt me,” Nuaman was quoted as saying. “I kept on running when a heap of sand came my way, I lied down on the sand … [A] few people from the community … [extinguished] fire by putting sand on me. I became unconscious, and they called 1122 Emergency medical helpline and called [for] an ambulance.”

Nuaman, who lives with his paternal uncle, said he does not know the attackers but can identify them with their faces.

The boy’s father died when he was 4, and his mother remarried.

The attack could be a reaction to a recent incident of lynching by some Christians of two suspected terrorists following a terror attack on a church in the same city, the group said.

Two suicide blasts hit the Christ Church and Catholic Church of Youhanabad Christian Colony in Lahore on March 15, killing 17 people. A Pakistani Taliban splinter group claimed responsibility for the attack, which left another 80 people injured.

Thousands of Christians rioted on the streets of Lahore following the attack, demanding more protection from the government. Reports said that two suspected terrorists were beaten to death and burned during the riots. The men were apparently in custody and were being shifted to a vehicle when the protesters got to them, beat them severely, tied them with a rope and set them on fire.

After the lynching incident, general hatred against the Christian minority has increased, the group believes.

Salon scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find “Christian terrorists”

The mainstream media, especially organs like Salon that are even more Leftist than the others, are always avid to exonerate Islam and establish the claim that Christianity is just as likely to incite its adherents to violence as Islam is. No group has a monopoly on evil, and certainly Christians have in history committed terrible atrocities in the name of their religion. The difference is that the Christian perpetrators of these atrocities did not and could not justify them by pointing to exhortations to such violence in Christian texts and teachings, while Islamic jihadis can and do justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims by pointing to Islamic texts and teachings exhorting the believers to be violent.

Salon, nonetheless, is determined to obscure that fact and prop up some “Christian terrorist groups” that it likens to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. None of these groups enjoy anything like the broad support among Christians that the Islamic State or al-Qaeda have among Muslims — have 25,000 Christians traveled from all over the world to join the Army of God? Nor does any sect of Christianity teach that Christians have a duty to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. What’s more, almost all of the violence listed here as having been committed by these Christian groups took place many years ago, suggesting that these groups are more or less moribund today — which, unfortunately, cannot be said of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. And even if all these violent acts had actually been committed recently by Bible-quoting Christians with the full approval of numerous Christian clerics and churches (which is not even close to being true), they still don’t add up to anything remotely comparable to the 25,000+ acts of jihad violence that Muslims have committed since 9/11.

“6 modern-day Christian terrorist groups our media conveniently ignores,” by Alex Henderson, Alternet via Salon, April 7, 2015:

…In the minds of far-right Republicans, Obama committed the ultimate sin by daring to mention that Christianity has a dark side and citing the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as two examples from the distant past. Obama wasn’t attacking Christianity on the whole but rather, was making the point that just as not all Christians can be held responsible for the horrors of the Inquisition, not all Muslims can be blamed for the violent extremism of ISIS (the Islamic State, Iraq and Syria), the Taliban, al-Qaeda or Boko Haram. But Obama certainly didn’t need to look 800 or 900 years in the past to find examples of extreme Christianists committing atrocities. Violent Christianists are a reality in different parts of the world—including the United States—and the fact that the mainstream media don’t give them as much coverage as ISIS or Boko Haram doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

Below are six extreme Christianist groups that have shown their capacity for violence and fanaticism.

1. The Army of God

A network of violent Christianists that has been active since the early 1980s, the Army of God openly promotes killing abortion providers—and the long list of terrorists who have been active in that organization has included Paul Jennings Hill (who was executed by lethal injection in 2003 for the 1994 killings of abortion doctor John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett), John C. Salvi (who killed two receptionists when he attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1994) and Eric Rudolph, who is serving life in prison for his role in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996 and other terrorist acts. Rudolph, in fact, has often been exalted as a Christian hero on the Army of God’s website, as have fellow Army of God members such as Scott Roeder (who is serving life without parole for murdering Wichita, Kansas-based abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009), Shelley Shannon (who attempted to kill Tiller in 2003) and Michael Frederick Griffin (who is serving a life sentence for the 1993 killing of Dr. David Gunn, an OB-GYN, in Pensacola, Florida).

Although primarily an anti-abortion organization, the Army of God also has a history of promoting violence against gays. And one of the terrorist acts that Rudolph confessed to was bombing a lesbian bar in Atlanta in 1997.

No Christian sect teaches that it is right to kill abortionists or gays. And the Army of God has apparently not killed any since 2009 — it seems to have been effectively neutralized, after a handful of killings which have often been invoked as the equivalent of those 25,000 jihad attacks.

2. Eastern Lightning, a.k.a. the Church of the Almighty God

Founded in Henan Province, China in 1990, Eastern Lightning (also known as the Church of the Almighty God or the Church of the Gospel’s Kingdom) is a Christianist cult with an end-time/apocalypse focus: Eastern Lightning believes that the world is coming to an end, and in the meantime, its duty is to slay as many demons as possible. While most Christianists have an extremely patriarchal viewpoint (much like their Islamist counterparts) and consider women inferior to men, Eastern Lightning believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth in the form of a Chinese woman. But they are quite capable of violence against women: in May 2014, for example, members of the cult beat a 37-year-old woman named Wu Shuoyan to death in a McDonalds in Zhaoyuan, China when she refused to give them her phone number. Eastern Lightning members Zhang Lidong and his daughter, Zhang Fan, were convicted of murder for the crime and executed in February. In a 2014 interview in prison, Lidong expressed no remorse when he said of Shuoyan, “I beat her with all my might and stamped on her too. She was a demon. We had to destroy her.”

Eastern Lightning’s other acts of violence have ranged from the killing of a grammar school student in 2010 (in retaliation, police believe, for one of the child’s relatives wanting to leave the cult) to cult member Min Yongjun using a knife to attack an elderly woman and a group of schoolchildren in Chenpeng in 2012. Christian groups are not exempt from Eastern Lightning’s fanaticism: in 2002, cult members kidnapped 34 members of a Christian group called the China Gospel Fellowship and held them captive for two months in the hope of forcing them to join their cult. Although mainly active in the communist People’s Republic of China, Eastern Lighting has been trying to expand its membership in Hong Kong.

I never heard of this group before, and it sounds very strange: with its Jesus-is-coming-back-as-a-Chinese-woman thing, it is hardly anything close to mainstream Christianity, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. Also, Jesus never says anything in the Gospels about beating women to death if they refuse to hand over their phone numbers. Does Salon really seriously think that this gang of psychopathic thugs is equivalent to an organized international network of dedicated jihadis such as al-Qaeda?

3. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)

The mainstream media have had much to say about the Islamist brutality of Boko Haram, but one terrorist group they haven’t paid nearly as much attention to is the Lord’s Resistance Army—which was founded by Joseph Kony (a radical Christianist) in Uganda in 1987 and has called for the establishment of a severe Christian fundamentalist government in that country. The LRA, according to Human Rights Watch, has committed thousands of killings and kidnappings—and along the way, its terrorism spread from Uganda to parts of the Congo, the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan. The word “jihadist” is seldom used in connection with the LRA, but in fact, the LRA’s tactics are not unlike those of ISIS or Boko Haram. And the governments Kony hopes to establish in Sub-Saharan Africa would implement a Christianist equivalent of Islamic Sharia law.

In reality, the Lord’s Resistance Army is funded by Sudanese jihadis, and reflects a Christian theology that is held by no Christian sect anywhere — in stark contrast to the undeniable fact that all the mainstream sects of Islam and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers.

4. TheNational [sic] Liberation Front of Tripura

India is not only a country of Hindus and Sikhs, but also, of Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants. Most of India’s Christians are peaceful, but a major exception is the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT). Active in the state of Tripura in Northeastern India since 1989, NLFT is a paramilitary Christianist movement that hopes to secede from India and establish a Christian fundamentalist government in Tripura. NLFT has zero tolerance for any religion other than Christianity, and the group has repeatedly shown a willingness to kill, kidnap or torture Hindus who refuse to be converted to its extreme brand of Protestant fundamentalism.

In 2000, NLFT vowed to kill anyone who participated in Durga Puja (an annual Hindu festival) And in May 2003, at least 30 Hindus were murdered during one of NLFT’s killing sprees.

Nothing since 2003? Another neutralized group.

5. The Phineas Priesthood

White supremacist groups don’t necessarily have a religious orientation: some of them welcome atheists as long as they believe in white superiority. But the Christian Identity movement specifically combines white supremacist ideology with Christianist terrorism, arguing that violence against non-WASPs is ordained by God and that white Anglo Saxon Protestants are God’s chosen people. The modern Christian Identity movement in the U.S. has been greatly influenced by the Ku Klux Klan—an organization that has committed numerous acts of terrorism over the years—and in the 1970s, new Christian Identity groups like the Aryan Nations and the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) emerged. Another Christian Identity group of recent decades has been the Phineas Priesthood, whose members have been involved in violent activities ranging from abortion clinic bombings to bank robberies (mainly in the Pacific Northwest). On November 28, 2014, Phineas Priesthood member Larry Steven McQuilliams went on a violent rampage in Austin, Texas—where he fired over 100 rounds at various targets (including a federal courthouse, the local Mexican Consulate building and a police station) before being shot and killed by police.

Here again, these are eccentric, marginal sects, with nothing remotely comparable to the following that the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have among Muslims. No sect of Christianity, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, teaches the supremacy of any race. In fact, Christianity teaches that all people are made in God’s image and are equal in dignity before God. Islam does not.

6. The Concerned Christians

One of the ironic things about some Christianists is the fact that although they believe that Jews must be converted to Christianity, they consider themselves staunch supporters of Israel. And some of them believe in violently forcing all Muslims out of Israel. The Concerned Christians, a Christianist doomsday cult that was founded by pastor Monte “Kim” Miller in Denver in the 1980s, alarmed Colorado residents when, in 1998, at least 60 of its members suddenly quit their jobs, abandoned their homes and went missing—and it turned out there was reason for concern. In 1999, Israeli officials arrested 14 members of the Concerned Christians in Jerusalem and deported them from Israel because they suspected them of plotting terrorist attacks against Muslims. One likely target, according to Israeli police, was Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque—the same mosque that was targeted in 1969 (when a Christianist from Australia named Denis Michael Rohan unsuccessfully tried to destroy it by arson) and, Israeli police suspect, was a likely target in 2014 (when Adam Everett Livix, a Christianist from Texas, was arrested by Israeli police on suspicion of plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem).

In 2008, Denver’s KUSA-TV (an NBC affiliate) reported that members of the Concerned Citizens had gone into hiding and that Miller hadn’t been seen in ten years.

All 1980s and 1990s. This group also appears to have been neutralized long ago, with the one possible exception of this Livix fellow in 2014. But again, Christianity doesn’t teach that Christians should blow up the holy places of other religions. It doesn’t teach “slay the non-Christians wherever you find them” (cf. Qur’an 9:5) or fight them “until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29) It doesn’t teach that non-Christians are “the most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6). Accordingly, there is no real equivalence. Probably even Salon knows that. But it continues to do all it can to try to ensure that you don’t.

Egypt’s most prominent Islamic authority issues a fatwa against AFDI’s bus ads

As Pamela Geller notes, think about all the things that Egypt’s most prominent Islamic authority is notissuing fatwas against: Islamic anti-semitism, the jihad imperative to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers under the hegemony of Islamic law, the institutionalized oppression of women in Islamic law, including even their Qur’an-sanctioned beating (4:34), the sexual slavery of the “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50), and so much more. Instead, they do what Islamic supremacists always do: blame the unbelievers for shedding light on unsavory aspects of Islamic law and practice, rather than cleaning house.

“Egypt Islamic Authority Issues Fatwa Against Philadelphia Anti-Islam Bus Posters,” by Lora Moftah, International Business Times, April 8, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Egypt’s most prominent religious authority has issued a religious proclamation, or fatwa, blasting a controversial anti-Islam poster campaign that has been running on public transport in Philadelphia over the past week.

The fatwa from Dar al-Ifta on Wednesday proclaiming the posters racist is the most notable international criticism to be added to the wave of condemnation against the campaign, which features slogans that link Islam to Nazism.

The posters include an image of Adolf Hitler having a sit-down meeting with Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim Palestinian nationalist leader during the 1920s and 1930s, whom the ad characterized as “the leader of the Muslim world.” The ad urges an end to “aid to all Islamic countries” under the slogan “Islamic Jew-Hatred: It’s in the Quran.” At least 84 buses in Philadelphia, the fifth-largest U.S. city, are scheduled to display the posters through the end of April.

The fatwa by the Egyptian religious authority condemned the campaign on the grounds that such a message not only portrayed Islam incorrectly but also spread prejudice, hatred and conflict in the U.S., a statement posted on the institution’s website said. “This hazardous campaign will leave the gate of confrontation and clashes wide open instead of exerting efforts toward peaceful coexistence and harmony,” it said.

The proclamation also argued that failing to respect Muslims in the U.S. would marginalize the religious minority from integrating into American society. Fatwas, which are nonbinding legal opinions issued by scholars, can be given on any subject, however these proclamations can often carry more weight when issued by top religious bodies such as Dar al-Ifta.

Other U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have previously displayed the ads, which are funded by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), an organization based in New Hampshire that the Southern Law Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group. The organization spent $30,000 to purchase the ads despite resistance from Philadelphia’s transport authority, which unsuccessfully challenged the ad buy in court. AFDI’s co-founder, political blogger Pamela Geller, has claimed that the bus ads were necessary in order to counter anti-Israel campaigns.

However, the campaign has garnered vocal opposition from public officials and civil rights and advocacy groups. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter led an interfaith rally calling for tolerance to counter the posters’ message, while Philadelphia’s Interfaith Center has also launched a dueling public messaging campaign that encourages people of all faith traditions to seek mutual understanding.

Cair (Council on American-Islamic Relations) called the ads bigoted, though it conceded AFDI’s right to run the campaign. “The First Amendment protects everyone, the hateful and the loving alike,” Cair staff attorney Ryan Tack-Hooper said in a statement. “Instead of suppressing dishonest and offensive speech, the American tradition is to respond with speech of our own. You can be sure we will.”

Sunni mosques in Yemen call for jihad against Shi’ite Houthis: “Allahu akbar! Rise for jihad!”

But surely they mean an interior spiritual struggle, or getting the kids to school on time, right? After all, Hamas-linked CAIR said that’s what jihad is all about, and they wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Anyway, as Lookmann, who sent this to me, “This cannot be. How can a “House of God,” a “House of Prayer,” give a call to kill fellow human beings? That too belonging to ‘The Religion Of Peace’!”

He also reminded me of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s quote: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

“Fighting in central Aden, mosques call for jihad: residents,” Daily Star, April 8, 2015 (thanks to Lookmann):

ADEN: Dozens of Yemeni Houthi fighters clashed with local militiamen in the central Aden district of Crater Wednesday and mosques broadcast calls for jihad to combat the Houthi forces trying to take over the southern Yemeni port city, residents said.

They said several houses were on fire after being hit by rockets, and families stayed indoors as fighting raged from street to street.

The Houthis, who are allied to soldiers loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, advanced into Crater Wednesday morning with a tank and two armoured vehicles, one resident said.

Mosques in Crater called on the population to wage holy war against the Houthis, their loudspeakers, usually reserved for sermons and the call to prayer, broadcasting: “God is the greatest! Rise for jihad!”

The battle in the old center of Aden came a day after fighters from the city said they had pushed the Houthis and allied troops from positions in northern Aden neighborhoods, which they said cut Houthi supply lines into the center.

One fighter, Yasser Mahmoud, said the Houthis had been pushed from the Dar Saad neighborhood at the northern approach to Aden. He said 22 Houthi fighters were killed when a tank and an armored vehicle were destroyed.

Three explosions shook northern areas of Aden Wednesday, in what residents said were airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition which is two weeks into a campaign to stem Houthi advances. They said the attacks appeared to target weapons depots.

This World Pregnant With Threats

“…try to answer the most urgent question, the question which torments all those who have happened to read our accounts: How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery and the dueling code? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of us do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified?” –Primo Levi

I read a lot. Perhaps not as much as those who can afford more time to read than I, but I read a lot. And in all my reading, one common peculiarity I find in all the articles written by the academia on the subject of Islamic anti-Jewish hatred is the safely-crafted reference to “the extreme and populist right” and to the fact that they are “definitely anti-Muslim,” to borrow the argot of Dr. Joel Kotek of ISGAP as an example (The New Rainbow Antisemitism: Time To Act, May 26, 2014).

I cannot deny the many good and useful analysis and delineations these academics have contributed to the fight against antisemitism, but the fact remains that they can never bring themselves to consider the possibility, though distant, that the mass renunciation of all Islamic antisemitism, contemporary and otherwise, as a result of honest and courageous exposure of its primary sources (even if such disclosure were extremely inconvenient for many of the culprits), would be a truly healthy example of a populism.

Simply because a movement gathers momentum to the point of what the “elites” would deem “populist” does not necessarily make that movement an evil, in much the same sense that, conversely, as Dr. Irwin Mansdorf points out, “Non-violence by itself does not mean it’s something that doesn’t hurt someone else.” That much of the Western world is waking up to the fact that Islam the religion is become dangerously and obtrusively problematic does not mean that an escape from our past somnolence in our failure to publicly recognize this danger is deserving of condemnation. The French Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, the Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights movements were all populist causes. Inherent and commendable within all these movements was that peculiar prejudice common to all those good men and women intolerant of political and religious tyranny.

And in their fight against antisemitism, isn’t the repudiation of all anti-Jewish hatred the end result—the populist movement—these scholars are driving for? Because if we do not intend to make the repudiation of anti-Jewish hatred a populist movement, whatever are we working toward in the meantime? The blasé attitudes of the majority of Western academia are, in my opinion, the only reason for their convenient refusal to publicly identify the religion of Islam—before it was ever “hijacked” by Islamist extremists and radical Muslims; before Zionism was ever espoused by the Arab League as a justifiable reason to murder Jews—as the primary instigant of contemporary antisemitism in the world today. You cannot halt cancer without neutralizing its aggressive cells; you cannot hold back the sea without building dikes; and you cannot eradicate antisemitism, at least from Western democracies, without controverting its primary sources.

Dorothy Rabinowitz writes, “The Obama administration’s propensity for denying reality has been a conspicuous feature from its beginnings, never more so, perhaps, than in the White House aversion to making any connection between Islam and terrorism.” The same can be said about the Western academe and their aversion to making any connection between Islam and contemporary antisemitism. And without making this connection, a populist movement against antisemitism will never be realized. In the meantime, such aversion is unfortunate for the non-Jew, but even more unfortunate for the Jew.

After all the books written about the Holocaust—after all the articles, and essays, and excruciating testimony from survivors and villains—we have another intended genocide gathering steam under our noses and yet we refuse to formally rebuke the religion at the forefront of this malefic onslaught. Blaise Pascal wrote, “To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.” Hence, for Western scholars to pretend today that, in light of a myriad of examples proving otherwise, the “middle way” somehow includes their shameless obfuscation of the fact that the religion of Islam is very much culpable for contemporary antisemitism, to refuse to come right out and say it, is now become an issue of morality. How deserving of honours, really, are their efforts when their toil continues to be inefficacious in removing the stain of anti-Jewish hatred from the heart of man? What are they doing, exactly, so that “…in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified?”