Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians

by Raymond Ibrahim

  The Commission’s report summarizes the situation well—from the ingrained contempt for minorities to the unwavering complicity of authorities. And let us consider the “dark side” it alludes to, concerning how “criminal elements” thrive in this environment. For example, the brutalization of Christian children by rapists is rife in neighboring Afghanistan.91 Islam’s teachings have dehumanized Christian children in the collective Muslim consciousness, prompting not only “extremists” but pedophiles and other sex offenders to use and abuse them at will while “moderates” look the other way.

  At the same time as the blasphemy case concerning Rimsha Masih—the fourteen-year-old Christian girl arrested in August 2012 on false accusations that she had burned pages of the Koran—was prompting international outrage, two other Christian children were raped and murdered in Pakistan without their cases garnering attention.

  Twelve-year-old Muqadas Kainat was ambushed in a field near her home in Sahawil by five Muslim men who “gang raped and murdered” her. Her father was at a hospital visiting her sick mother at the time. He and other family members began a frantic search, until a tip led them to the field where his daughter’s body lay. The postmortem revealed that she had been “gang raped and later strangled to death by five men.” Police, as usual, did not arrest any of the perpetrators.92

  And just a few days later eleven-year-old Samuel Yaqoob went to the markets of Faisalabad to buy food for his family, never to return. According to Wilson Chowdhry, Chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association,After extensive searching his body was found near a drain in the Christian colony, bearing marks of horrific torture, with the murder weapon nearby. His nose, lips and belly had been sliced off, and his family could hardly recognize him because the body was so badly burnt. Some 23 wounds by a sharp weapon have been identified in the autopsy. When sending his body for an autopsy, police raised the possibility of sodomy. . . . Parts of Pakistani culture have a strong homosexual pederast culture, and Christian and other minority boys are especially susceptible to rape and abuse because of the powerlessness of their community and their despised status.... In one case fairly recently, a Christian boy was kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by a police officer, his body similarly being dumped in a drain.93

  And there are many more documented cases: • Kiran George, a Christian girl who was “enslaved by a woman, Sama, a dealer of youth to be sold as prostitutes or slaves to wealthy Muslim families,” was doused with gasoline by a police officer involved in the sex ring, set on fire, and fatally burned in March 2010.94

  • Nisha, a nine-year-old Christian girl, was abducted by Muslims, gang-raped, murdered by repeated blows to her head, and then dumped into a canal in May 2009.95

  • Gulfam, another nine-year-old Christian girl, was raped by a Muslim man in December 2010. Though not killed, she was left “in shock and in the throes of a physical and psychological trauma.” During her ordeal, her rapist told her “not to worry because he had done the same service to other young Christian girls.”96

  • Lubna, a twelve-year-old Christian girl was kidnapped, gang-raped, and murdered by a group of Muslims in October 201 0.97

  • Kidnapped on Christmas Eve 2010, a twelve-year-old Christian girl, “Anna,” was gang-raped for eight months, forcibly converted, and then “married” to her Muslim attacker. After she escaped, instead of seeing justice done, “the Christian family is in hiding from the rapists and the police.”98

  • In June 2012 after gang-raping a thirteen-year-old Christian girl, a band of Muslims came to her house when all male members were away working and “mercilessly” beat her pregnant aunt for reporting them, causing her to lose twins to miscarriage: “They murdered our children, they raped our daughter. We have nothing left with us,” lamented an older family member. The police went on to pressure the family to drop the case, “accusing a 13-year-old rape victim of committing adultery with three men.”99

  • Muslims abducted Mehek, a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, at gunpoint “in broad daylight” from her parents’ house in August 2011. One of her abductors mockingly declared that he would “purify her” by making her “convert to Islam and become my mistress.”100

  • In December 2011 a Muslim man murdered a teenage Christian girl named Amariah during an attempted rape. He had “grabbed the girl and, under the threat of a gun, tried to drag her away. The young Christian woman resisted, trying to escape the clutches of her attacker, when the man opened fire and killed her instantly, and later tried to conceal the corpse.”101

  • Shazia, a twelve-year-old Christian girl, was enslaved, raped, and murdered by Chaudhry Naeem, a wealthy Muslim attorney, who was acquitted. His wife and son had also participated in abusing the child. “For the family of Shazia justice has not been done. It is not the first time that, in cases like this, the outcome of the process leaves influential Muslim citizens unpunished, despite the atrocities committed on poor and helpless Christians,” said the head of a human rights organization in November 2010.102

  • In May 2011 a powerful Muslim businessman had two Christian sisters kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and “married” to him. 103

  • In October 2012 a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Timar Shahzadi, was “pounced” on and “dragged” away by Muslim men as she was coming home from school. The family, fearful that she would be “forcefully converted to become a Muslim and then married off if immediate steps are not taken,” reported the incident to police, who did nothing. 104

  • In the same month, a court ordered a Christian girl, Rebbeca—who had been kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and married to her abductor—to be returned to her kidnapper “husband,” despite her father’s pleas and the girl’s obviously traumatized demeanor in court.105

  • In September 2012 Shumaila Masih, a sixteen-year-old Christian girl, was forcibly abducted from the street by three Muslim men, taken to one of their homes, and gang-raped for hours. The attack took place outdoors at 11:00 a.m., but no one intervened despite the girl’s desperate pleas for help. Around 5:00 p.m., returning from work, her father and his cousins began searching for her. When they came to the house where she was being raped, they heard her cries and rushed to her. “At the sight of the men, the three young Muslims fled, leaving Shumaila naked and in pain on the bed.”106

  The above anecdotes are a mere sampling of the documented atrocities committed against the children of Pakistan’s Christians. And of course there are the stories that fail to come to the notice of human rights organizations and never make it into any media—stories of silent abuse that only the nameless, faceless victims know. It took five years for the story of a two-year-old toddler who was savagely raped because her Christian father refused to convert to Islam to become public. After undergoing five surgeries, she remains disfigured, suffering from several permanent complications. Her family lives in fear and hiding. 107

  How many Christian children in Pakistan and other Muslim nations are being mauled in silence, with their stories never surfacing? This savagery is fueled by an Islamic culture that dehumanizes the non-Muslim. Local sources speaking to Agenzia Fides, the information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies, about the rape of nine-year-old Gulfam said, “It is shameful. Such incidents occur frequently. Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the community’s mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war [emphasis added].”108

  This assertion agrees very well with what Kuwaiti activist Mutairi and Egyptian cleric Huwaini have said in favor of the practice of using infidel sex slaves, and indeed with what Sharia law teaches—that infidel women are possessions to be bought and sold for Muslim use. Sharia expert Majid Khadduri explained the idea of human “spoils” in his War and Peace in the Law of Islam: The term spoil (ghanima) is applied specifically to property acquired by force from non-Muslims. It includes, however, not only property (movable and immovable) but also persons, whether in the
capacity of asra (prisoners of war) or sabi (women and children). . . . If the slave were a woman, the master was permitted to have sexual connection with her as a concubine. [Emphasis added.]109

  This view of non-Muslim women and children as objects of sexual gratification to be used and abused at will is not limited to the Muslim world; it manifests itself wherever significant numbers of Muslims live side by side with non-Muslims. In May 2012, for instance, Gatestone Institute published a telling report on Muslims in Britain, “pillars of their community” who “were sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison after being convicted of rape, aiding and abetting rape, conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child, sexual assault and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation”:Nine Muslim men belonging to a child-rape gang in northwestern England have received hefty prison sentences for trafficking and raping young British girls. The three-month sexual grooming trial at a court in Liverpool, which ended on May 9, has drawn nationwide attention to the sexual abuse of children and women by Muslim immigrants, and British police are currently investigating at least 40 other cases of child rapes perpetrated by Muslims in northern England.... The Liverpool Crown Court heard horrific testimony from five victims—the youngest was 13 when the abuse began—who were plied with alcohol, drugs and gifts so they could be “passed around” among a group of men aged between 24 and 59 for sex in apartments, houses, cars, taxis and kebab shops.... Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for them to be passed around for sex with dozens of men “because it’s what we do in our country.” [Emphasis added.]110

  MUSLIM JIHADIS: YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE

  According to Koran 9:29, war on the People of the Book—Christians and Jews—concludes only when they “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued”—that is, when they pay tribute and live under Islamic subjugation. From the very beginning, then, Christians literally had to “purchase” their right to exist from their Muslim conquerors.

  Buying off their subjugators took two forms: 1) As an institution: jizya was to be ritually and methodically collected from subjugated Christians. This tribute went on for centuries until it was abolished in the nineteenth century by intervening European powers. 2) As a way of life: before jizya became institutionalized (and again at the present moment, because it is no longer institutionalized) Christians were regularly plundered and ransacked by marauding Muslims. The institution of jizya is a product of Islamic doctrine. The unsystematic plundering of Christians is a product of Islamic culture, which sees Christians as undesirable inferiors to be used for the benefit of Muslims. Today, Muslims calling for the re-institutionalization of jizya believe they are authorized to take it upon themselves to plunder the Christians in their midst until such time that jizya is formally collected from Christians. The “criminal elements” that thrive under Islam rationalize their greed by portraying themselves as jizya-vigilantes.

  That Christians and Jews under Muslim domination must purchase their very lives is indicated by the fact that the Arabic word jizya itself simply means to “repay” or “recompense.” Conquered non-Muslims were to compensate Muslims with money for not taking their lives. Otherwise, not just their lives but their properties and families were forfeited.

  Islamic jurists are explicit. Abu Yusuf, a prominent eighth-century interpreter of Sharia, writes that the dhimmis’ “lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya.”111 Nearly thirteen hundred years later, in the twentieth century, Algerian cleric Muhammad ibn Yusuf wrote that jizya “is to compensate for their not being slain. Its purpose is to substitute for the duties of killing and slavery.... It is for the benefit of Muslims.”112 Western academics correctly call jizya “protection money,” which it is—but protection not from outsiders, as is sometimes suggested by academic apologists for Islam, but from Islam itself—protection which, unless paid, means the life of the infidel is forfeit. In the medieval era, dhimmi travelers sometimes had to wear their jizya receipts around their necks as proof that their lives had been ransomed. Otherwise they could be slain and plundered by any passing Muslim.

  Consider the words of Caliph Omar, the “righteous caliph” most associated with Islamic doctrine on the subjugation of Christians: “Summon the people to Allah; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, but those who refuse must pay the jizya out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”113 If non-Muslims do not ransom their lives, then they must die.

  From the beginnings of the Islamic conquest till the end of the Umayyad caliphate (c. 634-750), before the teachings of the Koran were codified, collecting jizya from Christians usually amounted to wholesale plunder.

  For instance, Amr bin al-As, the Islamic jihadi who conquered Egypt in the early 640s, tortured and killed any Christian Copt who tried to conceal his wealth. When a Copt inquired of him, “How much jizya are we to pay?” the Islamic hero replied, “If you give me all that you own—from the ground to the ceiling—I will not tell you how much you owe. Instead, you [the Christian Copts] are our treasure chest, so that, if we are in need, you will be in need, and if things are easy for us, they will be easy for you.”114

  Yet even that was not enough. Caliph Uthman later chided Amr bin al-As because another governor of Egypt had managed to increase the caliphate’s treasury double what Amr had. In the words of Uthman, the “milk camels [Egypt’s Christians, that is] . . . yielded more milk.”115 Years later, yet another caliph, Suliman Abdul Malik, wrote to the governor of Egypt advising him “to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.”116

  A Coptic chronicle describes the situation of Egyptian Christians in the 700s:And out of love for money he [the Muslim governor of Egypt] commanded the governors to put the people to death, and bring him their money; and wrote to them, saying: “I have delivered up to you the lives of the people, therefore collect all the wealth that you can, from bishops or monks or churches or any of the people, and bring stuffs and money and cattle and all that you find belonging to them, and respect no one. And whatever place you visit, pillage it.” Accordingly, the officials laid the country waste and carried off the columns and the woodwork, and sold what was worth ten dinars for one dinar. . . . ”

  Many Christian monks were tortured and mutilated for money.117 The same story of rapacity and brutality was repeated all over the Islamic empire. In Armenia decades after the above anecdote, a Christian chronicler wrote,In the reign of Abdallah [Abu Jafar al-Mansur, who ruled from 754–775] and on the orders of Yazid, Armenia was struck by extremely onerous taxation. The infernal avarice of the implacable enemy was not satisfied with devouring the flesh of the Christians, the flower of the country, nor with drinking their blood as we drink water; Armenia in its entirety suffered horribly from the absolute lack of money. Every individual, even by giving all he had, his clothes, his food stuffs and prime necessities, did not succeed in paying his ransom and redeeming his person from torture. Gibbets, presses and gallows had been set up everywhere; nothing but fearful and continual torture was seen everywhere.118

  While such episodes typify the early years of Islam, they punctuate the whole of dhimmi history from one corner of the Islamic world to the other. The cautious jizya entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam states that “with or without doctrinal justification, arbitrary demands [for money] appeared at times.” Even the medieval Marco Polo, whose chronicles appear impartial and objective,119 made an interesting observation concerning the Muslims in Tauris (modern day Iraq) in the thirteenth century:According to their doctrine, whatever is stolen or plundered from others of a different faith, is properly taken, and the theft is no crime; whilst those who suffer death or injury by the hands of Christians [during the course of a plunder-driven raid], are considered as martyrs. If, therefore, they were not prohibited and restrained by the powers who now govern them, they would commit many outrages. These principles are common to all
Saracens .120

  This lust for money was so great in the early years of Islam, under the Umayyads, that many non-Muslims tried to convert to Islam to avoid absolute poverty and destitution only to be prevented from converting by the Muslim governors, who preferred to treat them as “milk camels.”