Islamic Forced Conversions — Past and Present

by Raymond Ibrahim

The lost history of Christians forced to convert to Islam—or die—is reemerging, figuratively and literally. According to the BBC: “Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony [last Sunday] at the Vatican—a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480.They were beheaded in the southern Italian town of Otranto after refusing to convert to Islam.”

Palestinian Christian protesters lament forced conversions of loved ones.

The BBC adds in a sidebar: “The ‘Martyrs of Otranto’ were 813 Italians beheaded for defying demands by Turkish invaders to renounce Christianity.  The Turks had been sent by Mohammed II, who had already captured the ‘second Rome’ of Constantinople.”

Historical texts throughout the centuries are filled with similar anecdotes, including the “60 Martyrs of Gaza,” Christian soldiers who were executed for refusing Islam during the 7^th century Islamic invasion of Jerusalem. Seven centuries later, during the Islamic invasion of Georgia, Christians refusing to convert were forced into their church and set on fire. Witnesses for Christ lists 200 anecdotes of Christians killed—including some burned at the stake, thrown on iron spikes, dismembered, stoned, stabbed, shot at, drowned, pummeled to death, impaled and crucified—for refusing to embrace Islam.

If history is shocking, the fact is, today, Christians—men, women, and children—are still being forced to convert to Islam.  Pope Francis alluded to their sufferings during the same ceremony: “As we venerate the martyrs of Otranto, let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, in these times and in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence, and give them the courage and fidelity to respond to evil with good.”…

….In Sudan, Muslims kidnapped a 15-year-old Christian girl; they raped, beat and ordered her to convert to Islam. When her mother went to police to open a case, the Muslim officer of the so-called “Family and Child Protection Unit,” told her: “You must convert to Islam if you want your daughter back.”

Indeed, because Christian females are the most vulnerable segments of Islamic societies, they are especially targeted for forced conversions. In 2012, U.S. Congress heard testimony about the “escalating abduction, coerced conversion and forced marriage of Coptic Christian women and girls [550 cases in the last five years alone].Those women are being terrorized and, consequently, marginalized, in the formation of the new Egypt.”

As my new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians documents, wherever there are large numbers of Muslims—whether in the Arab World, Africa, Asia, or even in the West—Christians are being persecuted.  Forced conversions are the tip of the iceberg, and certainly not anomalies of history.

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Why Islam’s Sharia law is the biggest threat to American safety

 

WASHINGTON , May 10, 2013 — Former US Attorney General Mike Mukasey spoke recently at Temple Emanuel in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Isms all want to rid the world of something. Nazism wanted to rid the world of Jews. Communism wanted to rid the world of God. Islamism wants to rid the world of infidels – that is you,” said Mukasey.

Sharia (the “path) is Islamic law. According to most sources, including the Council on Foreign Relations, shariah is made up of rules that regulate every nook and cranny of life – worship, marriage and inheritance, criminal offenses, commerce and personal conduct. “It is derived primarily from the Quran and the Sunna—the sayings, practices, and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.”

The bombings and shootings in the name of Islam, such as the Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, the “Underwear Bomber” and 911 are just one element of how sharia law calls Muslims to fight against those who do not accept their law.

Andrew McCarthy, former federal prosecutor and co-author of Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis, wrote, “American elites still deal with sharia as just a religious system, when in fact it is as totalitarian a political program as ever were those of communism, fascism, national socialism, or Japanese imperialism.”

The Muslim holy book, the Quran, says that non-Muslims are “the most vile of created beings” (Q 98:6)

Omar Ahmad, co-founder/Board Chairman of Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), in 1998 said publicly, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

Islam’s sharia law is insinuating itself into our courtrooms, schools, prisons and every other aspect of society. The lever often used is one of discrimination against the precepts of shariah, while Christian and Jewish customs and laws remain.

America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. From those foundational principles, Jews and Christians predominantly built this nation’s entire infrastructure from hospitals, universities and charities to the industries that made life better for much of the world.

Islamic principles, defined by sharia law, are in absolute direct opposition to everything Americans believe regarding the law and civil society.

How is sharia showing up in America?

In a 2011 report, Center for Security Policy found 50 “significant” published appellate court cases where sharia law entered the court’s decision making. “Some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.”

• While later overturned, a New Jersey judge exonerated a Muslim man of raping his wife because sharia allowed him to do so. (The ruling was later overturned.)

• The Muslim Students’ Association – Muslim Accommodations Task Force has convinced at least 17 universities to have foot baths built or under construction, including Boston University, George Washington University and Temple University, and at least nine universities have prayer rooms for “Muslim students only,” including Stanford, Emory and the University of Virginia, according to USA Today.
• Illinois’ Skokie School Districts replaced Veteran’s Day with Eid ul Adha, a major Muslim holiday, in 2013.
• In Ohio, a Muslim death row inmate, Abdul Awkal, has filed a federal lawsuit arguing the prison system’s failure to provide halal meals is a restraint on his religious freedoms. His on-going case already succeeded in having pork removed from the prison system’s menu.

This matters because the punishments and discrimination, especially against women, defy American principles of human rights, religious freedom, and equality of all before the law. Women must remain mostly covered, and under some interpretations completely covered. Female genital mutilation is practiced in some Muslim nations to protect chastity. Men can have four wives while women only one husband. Women receive half the inheritance of a brother and so on.

Islamic Sharia law cannot co-exist with the American system of government.

Andrew McCarthy wrote, “Shariah is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the forces of shariah have been at war with non-Muslims for 1400 years and with the United States of America for 200 years. While the most recent campaign to impose this totalitarian code began in the late 20th Century, it is but the latest in a historical record of offensive warfare that stretches back to the origins of Islam itself.”….

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Europe: Mosque Building Shifts into High Gear

by Soeren Kern

From Belgium to Greece and Spain to Germany, 2013 is shaping up to be another banner year for the construction of mosques in Europe.

In Belgium, work is about to begin on the construction of a mega-mosque in Liège, the third-largest city in the country. The largest mosque in Wallonia (the French-speaking region of Belgium) will be built on an 11,000 m² (118,000 ft²) plot and will consist of a main building with a capacity for 1,000 worshippers, a library, a cafeteria and several shops.

Plans to build two 30 m (98 ft) minarets were scrapped after opposition from local residents. The new plan involves one 18 m (60 ft) minaret which will be automatically illuminated during calls to prayer.

The mayor of Liège, Willy Demeyer (PS), banned a protest march against the mosque that was to have been held on March 30. “My role is to avoid excesses and problems of public order,” he said.

In Germany, Muslims in the northern city of Hamburg are converting the former Kapernaumkirche (Capernaum Church), a cultural heritage site, into a mosque.

In the southern German city of Munich, local politicians are debating where to build a massive mosque complexknown as the Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (ZIE-M). The 6,000 m² (65,000 ft²) mega-project, which will cost an estimated €40 million ($51 million), is designed to be a key strategic platform for spreading Islam throughout Europe.

Speculation is rife that the Persian Gulf Emirate of Qatar will pay for the project, although the Qatari Ambassador to Germany recently told the newspaper Münchner Merkur that no final decision has been made.

The citizen’s movement Die Freiheit Bayern (Freedom Bavaria) organized a demonstration against the project in downtown Munich on March 24, but only 120 people bothered to show up.

In Greece, which is effectively bankrupt, the government has pledged to spend €1.1 million ($1.4 million) to build an official mosque in Athens for the city’s expanding Muslim population.

The mosque, which will be built on the former naval base in Votanikos, will be able to hold around 500 worshippers as well as hundreds more in an outdoor area.

The Greek government agreed in September 2011 to pay for the mosque after an offer from the Turkish government to pay for it was rejected by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, and opposed by the Muslim community in Greece, which insisted that the Greek state pay for it….

….In Switzerland, a Muslim group called Club Paradise is converting a bowling alley into a mosque. The future imam of the new mosque, Fehim Dragusha, originally from Kosovo, made local headlines in late 2011 when he called on Muslim parents to beat their children if they refuse to pray. Dragusha says he was misunderstood because of his poor German language skills. He now says he favors a “modern Islam.”

In other mosque-related news, the Danish toymaker Lego has tried to defend its controversial decision to remove its Jabba’s Palace toy set — based on a scene from Star Wars Episode VI — from store shelves.

In January 2013, the Turkish Cultural Community of Austria (TCA) complained that “Jabba’s Palace” resembled the Hagia Sophia mosque, originally a Christian church, in Istanbul, formerly the Christian city of Constantinople; and that the accompanying figures depicted “racial prejudice and vulgar insinuations” against Muslims as people with “deceitful and criminal personalities.”

Initially, Lego refused to back down, insisting that the product was merely a faithful reproduction of the images in the Star Wars movie. But after a meeting in Munich on March 29 between Turkish community leaders and Lego executives, Lego agreed to end its production of the toy from 2014 onwards.

Lego says its decision had nothing to do with pressure from Muslims and everything to do with the natural lifecycle of the product. But the Turks do not see it that way. The jubilant president of the TCA, Birol Killic, said in a statement: “We are very grateful and congratulate Lego on the decision to take Jabba’s Palace out of production.” He added: “Lego managers have also promised that the chief toy maker will be sensitized on this [multicultural] issue.”

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How horrible to be a woman in Pakistan

Time to Demand Human Rights in the Middle East

By Ronn Torossian

For all the flaming liberals who scream about equal rights, discrimination and the like, where are these people when it comes to women’s rights in the Middle East?

An industry comprised of many elite liberals, concerned with “humanitarian issues,” is the industry in which I make my living in Public Relations.  And lo and behold, amidst deafening silence, the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) last week hosted “The 4th Public Relations Forum” in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Major US PR firms, including Ketchum, Hill & Knowlton, and Burson-Marsteller, have offices in the region and surely benefit from the PR growth in the region.  But why don’t they look at where they are making their living?

Recently in Saudi Arabia, seven men were executed by the government – after torture and without lawyers or the right to appeal at their trial. The nation of Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t recognize the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Saudi courts allow beheading, stoning, and the US State Department says “discrimination against women is a significant problem” in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian women are required to have a male guardian and need their guardian’s permission for marriage and divorce; travel, if under 45; education; employment; opening a bank account; and they can’t drive or vote. If Muslims convert to another religion, the penalty is execution.

Fit place for Public Relations liberals to hold conferences, huh?

Yet, review yesterday’s New York Times and witness no less than three op-eds attacking Israel….

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