No Compulsion In Religion Alert: "Taliban Tells Pakistani Christians: Convert or Die," from AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Christians in a Pakistani town beset by pro-Taliban militants sought government protection Wednesday, the eve of a deadline for them to convert to Islam or face violence.About 500 Pakistani Christians in Charsadda, a town in the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, received letters earlier this month telling them to close their churches and convert by Thursday or be the target of "bomb explosions."
Several Christians, a tiny minority in the predominantly Muslim country, have fled town and others are living in fear, community leaders said.
Some complained that police were not taking the threat seriously.
"Police say someone is joking with us by writing these letters," Chaudhry Salim, a Charsadda Christian leader, said during a news conference in Islamabad. "They have deployed only two policemen at our churches ... this is the kind of security we are getting now."
Shahbaz Bhatti, a prominent Christian leader and head of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, said the provincial government, which is controlled by a coalition of pro-Taliban religious parties, would bear blame for attacks after the deadline.
THe immoral majority has ruled...
How many Pakistanis would leave Islam if they did not face the threat of violence? Why can't the leaders of western nations understand the huge opportunity these virtual prisoners of conscience represent? My kingdom for a Ronald Reagan!
I am Pakistani Christian living in Canada. It hurts me to see how much Pakistani muslims who immigrated to Canada, enjoy freedom and rights while back in Pakistan same muslims show hatred towards minorities.
Please Google on 'Blasphemy Law in Pakistan' and you will see what this law has done to tiny Christian population of Pakistan.
Oppressed Christian minorities in Islamic nations are the perfect people to focus our efforts on. The impact of standing up for them will be much greater than any military campaign. Their liberation has the potential to decisively weaken Islam's hold on entire nations, either through apostasy or liberalization to avoid it. Of course, there are no western leaders with the intelligence to realize this, or maybe they just lack vision.
My kingdom for another Ronald Reagan!
Aren't Christians supposed to be offered dhimmi status, a third alternative to converting or dying, as long as they obey certain rules? Apparently, these Pakistani muslims aren't even good muslims.
Imagine if a mosque in the US, Canada, or Europe were to receive a notice that they should convert to Christianity or they will be bombed, or if a mosque in India were told to return to Hinduism or face violence. If this happened, every liberal "human rights" organization would be screaming about the poor oppressed Muslims while the Muslims would be marching and rioting while demanding UN action. Bush, Condi and Blair would loudly condemn these "attacks" on the Religion of Peace.
But when Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Hindus are threatened with violence or even murdered by Muslims across the Umma, the silence in deafening.
" the silence in deafening.
Posted by: Provoslavni "
...it does baffle the mind....
I am still curious....
When are Christians in the West going to help these Christians out?
Does anyone know what the laws are and are the muslims and goverment counting on the fact that Christians are fractured societies and not organized, so that they can wipe them out in groups? Christians in the west are not responding.
Can Christians in Pakistan organize militias?
http://www.barnabasfund.org/
This organization helps oppressed Christians throughout the Islamic world.
It is impossible for Pakistani Christians to get visit visa or Student visa for Canada because the staff that processes and prepares case to be presented in front of the Visa Counselors are all muslim. The muslim staff in Canadian embassy makes sure that Christians do not get visa to go to Canada.
Thank you Canada.
Hey maybe they'll kill these Christians with the new upgrades Uncle Sam put on their F16's.
Every missle will have the slogan "there is no compulsion in Islam"
Off topic:
Comic in US 'hate speech' row
Article and URL to video here.
Ummah News Links
As someone pointed out earlier it is as if our Judeo-Christian heritage urges peace and mercy while our Greco-Roman heritage urges us to conquest and glory.
Once we revive our Greco-Roman heritage, perhaps we will begin acting like the great civilization that we are. We should beat down the barbarians for the glory of it. When we're done, we can dispense mercy as needed.
Our model in dealing with Islamic states should be that of Rome vs Carthage under the General Scipio in the Third Punic War.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_3d_punic.htm
Third Punic War
© 1998-2003 N.S. Gill.
We must occupy and systematically destroy the two fetishes of the enemy. They must leveled to the ground and made a wasteland.
The gods of the enemy, the temples and the foundations of the priestly class and the cult must be destroyed. The gods must be shown unequivocally as stones fetishes.
The Crusaders are the wrong example, since they only dealt with the symptom ( occupation of Jerusalem ) and not the root cause ( ideology centered on Mecca and Medinah )
Romans did it right. Pax Romana only came about after Carthage had been 'mixed with salt'.
"Once we revive our Greco-Roman heritage, perhaps we will begin acting like the great civilization that we are"...
Sorry. No. I've heard this argument before in various circles: the idea that the Bible has weakened the West and - faced with the peculiar challenge of the Islamic jihad - we had better drop Christianity and revive purely pagan (pre-Christian, non-christian) Greco-Roman ideas to 'win'. Or, for that matter, revive Northern Europe's pre-Christian Viking/ Norse heritage...down with that miserable weak puling Jew Jesus - what we need is the Real Thing, Odin Glutter-of-the-Crows. Someone pushed that idea before, you know. Name of Hitler. Thought all that Jewish stuff about compassion and justice and so on was so much pusillanimous rubbish, weakened the sinews and softened the brain, better kill all the Jews to save the pagan soul of Europe and revive the Hero... Before him, the proponent par excellence of that doctrine was Friedrich Nietzsche. Voldemort sums Nietzsche up nicely in the film of the first book, when he tells Harry: "There is neither good nor evil, there is only Power, and those too weak to take it..." Harry responds "LIAR!!!". We take Voldemort's path at our peril. I don't want the Norse - or the Celtic - or the Greek, or the Roman - god-demons back. To defeat Allah by such means is as bad as to submit to Allah.
Christianity did not ruin Rome or Athens (that is Gibbon's little piece of propaganda). They ruined themselves by things they were already doing before the Christians came along e.g. their rate of female infanticide was horrific. The Christians - in the West, and in Byzantium - preserved whatever was worth keeping, and carried it safely through the Dark Ages...
For an antidote to this popular misconception - that Jews and Christians are backboneless and 'weak', needing to be 'corrected' by a good solid dose of pure pagan heroism - see: St Joan of Arc.
See also G K Chesterton - the poem 'Ballad of St Barbara', and 'The Ballad of the White Horse'; and the following books - Orthodoxy, Heretics (which includes a three-page demolition of Nietzsche in short order), and The Everlasting Man.
And I really recommend David Bentley Hart, "The Beauty of the Infinite", in particular the chapter entitled "The Consolations of Tragedy and the Terrors of Easter".
"Tragic wisdom [which in fact underlies Greek and Roman philosophy] is the wisdom of resignation and consent, a wisdom that is too prudent to rebel against what is fixed in the very fabric of being, and that refuses to suffer inordinately, enraged by death or resentful of civic order. Tragedy legitimates a particular regime of law, violence, and war; it teaches that moira places and displaces us, and so leads us to a serene and chastened acceptance of how we are placed and how we are displaced; tragedy resists every movement outward, beyond the sentineled frontier, and reinforces the stable foundation of the totality [the World]. Christianity, however, feeds upon a different wisdom, A DEFIANT, JEWISH WISDOM THAT INSISTS UPON AN ACT OF AFFIRMATION FAR REMOVED FROM THE RESIGNED SERENITY OF TRAGIC CONSCIOUSNESS... A recognition of the true universality of suffering, of its endless particularity and the infinite gravity of its every instance (no matter how base the sufferer) is a Jewish, not an Attic, accomplishment, and it leads inevitably to a prophetic outcry...a demand for divine justice. ISRAEL IS ALWAYS, AND ALWAYS EVER MORE, IN REBELLION AGAINST THE WISDOM OF TOTALITY..." And "it is from Israel that Christianity learns the grammar of charity, its passionate commitment to creation and its revulsion before injustice, rather than resignation before the magnitude of evil" (pages 386 , 387).
Bat Ye'or's writing about dhimmitude perfectly embodies precisely that Jewish rebellion, that rejection of resignation to 'the Way Things Are', that sizzling Jewish indictment of all injustice. No. We don't need Odin Glutter-of-the-Crows, nor the pagan Mars. We need Moses, David, Joshua, Daniel. Those who call ourselves Jew or Christian need not - DARE NOT - invoke any name than that of the Lion of Judah.
Reminds me of the movie "Heavy Metal":
"DEATH TO ALL WHO OPPOSE US!"
Gee...what a shock.
A correction to my posting above: 'any name other than that of the Lion of Judah'.
Further clarification: the difference between a Jewish hero-martyr and a Muslim hero-martyr is thusly:
A devout IDF soldier hurled himself bodily upon a Hezbollah grenade, shouting 'Shma Yisroel!...", thus dying but at the same time absorbing the explosion and saving the lives of all his mates nearby.
A muslim suicide bomber recites 'Allahu akbar' while detonating his explosive vest/ explosive-packed vehicle in the midst of a crowd of civilians in London...Madrid...Israel...
I know which of those two is the worthier example.
PS - Rowlings has done a brilliant job so far. MILLIONS of European and American and Asian children, reading the 'Harry Potter' books or watching the films, are soaking up the very non-PC idea that it is both necessary and right to use physical, forceful means to resist an evil that is embodied in violent terrorists - and at the same time, that one cannot, must not, imitate the enemy in his despicable attitude and tactics (the deception, the pleasure in hurting and terrifying others, the arrogance and greed, the Will to Power). Harry belongs to the House of God-ric (good or god + ruler) Griffindor (the golden griffin, lion and eagle), its symbol a sword of silver and rubies - an image that plugs straight into the truth at the heart of the Crusader ideal. Every kid wants to belong to Griffindor (courage, loyalty, LOVE) - which means they are wanting to become...Crusaders. Harry flies on the Hippogriff - and THAT - fierce yet also holy and beautiful - is a true image of what Christians mean by Love (the very opposite of slush, blind pacifism or warm fuzzies). Rowlings is teaching that love, mutual loyalty and fierce focused physical resistance are needed to combat a ruthless enemy that employs 5th-columnists and whose chief weapon is terror sown by gratuitous killings, torture, etc...Once kids who have read/ watched 'Harry Potter' join the armies of India - or America - or Europe - or Russia - all they will need is someone to explain that the jihadists are like real-life Voldemorts and Death-Eaters, and that our own cause is as much worth fighting for as the House of Griffindor, that in a very real sense we ARE the 'Order of the Phoenix'.
Compare the film 'Battle of Britain' or even Peter Weir's 'Gallipoli', with Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator' and you will see the difference between war in the context of Christendom, and war in the Greco-Roman pagan context.
dumbledoresarmy;
thankyou for an informative and thought-provoking post. I'm the wrong generation for Harry but thirty-five years ago I read Narnia (all of them, several times)to my son. Would you say that Rowling is doing for this generation what Lewis did for mine?
Kate
To Kate - yes, I hope. We who have read Mr Spencer's or Bat Ye'or's books know EXACTLY how closely the jihadists resemble Voldemort ...or Lewis's 'cruel Calormenes' (reread 'The Horse and His Boy' for a delicious debunking of the whole Golden Andalusia myth). But as teachers, as parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, we need to help kids recognise those very telling parallels and the implications for themselves.
The beauty of Lewis and Rowling (Tolkien is another) is that they foster both realism and genuine hope, and show us in a fresh light all the things that we fight FOR, not just what we are fighting AGAINST.
In a few decades this will be happening in America unless the political left is stopped in its tracks.
Aren't Muslims supposed to give the People of the Book three choices?
1. Convert
2. Accept dhimmi status
3. Die
This latest threat against Pakistan's Christians goes completely against the Qur'an, and is the first real instance of Islamic exremism, where Muslims are more extreme than what their Qur'an prescribes.
What is humanity going to do with this satanic cult of death?
As a Christian my response would be, "you can have my head, but you will never have my heart, that belongs to Jesus Christ!"
"Lan Astaslem!" will do nicely.
("I will not submit!")
Aren't Muslims supposed to give the People of the Book three choices?
1. Convert
2. Accept dhimmi status
3. Die
To Convert or to accept Dhimmi status is to die a slow death at the hands of these barbaric psychological murderers.
Muslims are either conquerors or conquerors-to-be. There is no compromise in Islam.
dumbledore's army - You seem to think that I'm advocating a neo paganism. I am not.
What I'm trying to state is that the foundation of enemy activity and justification must be shown to be false. That foundation is where the 'will to power' is found.
This thing will go on for another 1,426 years or until the god is shown to be false. The Crusaders had the wrong strategy because they failed to understand what needed to be done. The Romans understood.
I didn't read any advocacy of returning to ne0-Paganism is Plagues post. Nevertheless, Dumbledoresarmy's response was beautiful, even if it wasn't to what Plagues was advocating. In other words, you both are correct although in very different ways.
However, Islam has shown us the way in one important aspect. Regardless of the evil of Islamic ideology, it is still admirable in its staying power. This is something we should learn from. As Sun Tsu wrote: "Learn from your enemy and turn his own strengths against him." Our policy shoul be to impose exactly the same upon Muslims that they impose on us.
First, expel Muslim immigrants unless they convert and restrict all practice of Islam by visitors or guest workers, just as Saudi Arabia does to non-Muslims.
Second, where there are large numbers of indigenous Muslims (Russia, Israel, India, Thailand, etc.) we should impose dhimmitude on them based on the restrictions of the Pact of Omar. This would mean:
No new mosques or madrassas can be built nor can old ones be repaired without special permission.
No public manifestations of Islam such as processions, prostrations in public, or muezzin's calls.
Muslims should have to wear distinctive clothing but hijab is forbidden. All children would receive a non-Muslim education and any Muslim child who wishes to leave Islam may do so without parents approval.
Muslim women should be encouraged to marry non-Muslim men but Muslim men forbidden to marry non-Muslim women.
Finally, a progressive jizya tax would be imposed on all Muslims.
This is simply doing to them what they've done to us in every nation they conquered. I suspect the results would be the same and millions would leave Islam and revert to the religions of their ancestors.