"Algerian Security Forces Weigh New Anti-Missionary Program"

"An Algerian security forces team is examining a new program for fighting missionary activity, to be submitted to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika."

...goes to show, religious plurality or Islamic tolerance towards faiths of other people simply will not be permitted...

it is one of the reasons you do not want these Islamic type goons in your neighborhood....Ban Muslim Immigration...

The program, which was prepared by clerics, includes encouraging citizens to report missionary activity and efforts to raise funds to support indigent individuals considering converting to Christianity

Seems like the Muslims didn't learn from history. Don't they know that persecution only makes Christianity grow faster?

I hate to break it to you, Crusader, but Muslim persecution has had the effect of making Christianity all but disappear from the Middle East. Of course, Christians usually go underground and sprout from below, as they did in Rome. Unlike Rome, which made "peace" with the Christians by making it the state religion and changing it significantly, Islam has waged a war of attrition on Christians and Jews. Christians have disappeared from Northern Africa, where Augustine lived, where there were once vibrant Christian cultures. Turkey has few Christians, and there is renewed persecution there, too.
Under Communism, however, China has seen Christianity grow with overwhelming persecution. The Spirit moves as He will, so there is always hope.

And of course we know how successful the old Soviet Union was in preserving its way of life.

"The main region of concern is Kabylia, but missionary activity is taking place also in other regions of the country."
-- from the article above

No mystery as to why Christian missionaries might be having their greatest success in the Kabyle. In Algeria, that remains the Berber heartland. It is where the Berbers, that is those who were not forcibly transformed, during the centuries of Arab rule (interrupted by 132 years of French rule) into "Arabs" (how many of those "Arabs" who now persecute the Berbers realize that they themselves are a generation, or two, or five removed from their clearly Berber origins?)

The cause of the Berbers is hardly known in this country. The writer Kateb Yacine, a Berber who refused to write in Arabic, but chose French, is celebrated in France, especially among Berbers -- but unknown in this country, and his anti-Arab rage is not likely to cause his books to be included in the syllabuses of courses on "Francophone" literature given that so many such courses are now taught by French-speaking Arabs.

What is that cause? In the first place, it is linguistic and cultural. In Algeria, where the French rightly saw the Berbers as superior to the Arabs -- one French general wrote a book about the "Europeanness" of the Berbers -- the Berbers were not discriminated against, but as soon as the French left, the forced arabisation of the Berbers started up at once, as if the French interregnum, with the wider possiblilites that French education made possible to both Berbers and Arabs, had never existed. Older people in Algeria speak and use French; the younger ones are forgetting. And meanwhile, the Berbers were forbidden to use their own language, the Berber language, Tamazight, in their schools, in their institutions, and even, at times, they could be punished for using it among themselves, on the street. Berber culture was officially ignored.

About twenty years ago, news of agitation began to reach the outside world. There were riots in Tizi-Ouzou. Reported in France, but hardly anywhere else in the Western world. In America, of course, we had all been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO propaganda (performed as a "public service" by the big oil companies, as part of their propaganda payoff to the Saudis for allowing them to find, produce, and then pay exorbitantly for the oil that happens to lie under the malevolent sands of "Saudi" Arabia), to believe that there is something called "the Arab world" and in this "Arab world" there are no Copts, no Armenians, no Assyrians, no Chaldeans, no Turkmen, no Mandeans, no Maronites, and of course no Berbers, no Jews (no, there never were any Jews in North Africa or the Middle East -- they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe), for everyone in the Arab world was an "Arab."

The discovery or re-discovery of a Berber identity (and how many of those North African "Arabs" should begin to realize that they are Berbers? There is, by the way, a genetic marker that, in studies by French geneticists in Tunisia, shows that Berbers and Arabs can be easily distinguished) is or could be an important weapon in unsettling the world of Islam, and perhaps causing the Maghreb to see itself, as it should not as "Arab" but as the victim of Arab imperialism.

For what is Islam if not a vehicle of Arab imperialism, and what are the Berbers, if not the victims of that Arab imperialism, an imperialism far more potent and long-lasting than the European kind, for it attempts to efface the historic identity of whole peoples?

And it makes perfect sense that Berbers in the Kayble would, having felt along their pulses the Arab imperialism of which Islam is the vehicle, would be more open to the efforts of Christian missionaries, or more likely, are not so much responding to missionary activity, but to their own observations as to what Christianity is like, and what Islam has brought them.

In this respect, one should not underestimate the fact that Berbers now live in France, that they make up most of the membershp of such groups as the "maghrebins laiques," and that they, not the Arabs whose ethnic identity is so found up with Islam, are capable, in some cases, not of identifying with the Arabs, but more closely with the French. And those Berbers communicate with Berbers at home, or through the Internet. And sometimes they return, to Algeria and Morocco, to see their families, and bring with them their own observations on the relative merits of the Islamic world, a world suffused with Islam, and the non-Islamic world, the one they have experienced in France.

The more the non-Arab Muslims of the world, and 80% of the world's Muslims are not Arab, come to realize -- and it would not be hard to help them to realize, for they will not be able to deny the facts, having experienced so much of it themselves -- that Islam is a vehicle for that Arab supremacism, the more likely it is that at least some of them will fall away. And others, who may stick with a kind of "non-Arab" Islam (as if such were possible) will, in so doing, at least help to divide, and therefore to weaken, the Camp of Islam.

Ideally, one would wish this Total System, that has held so many hundreds of millions in thrall, and thwarted over so many centuries so much human potential (think of the art, think of the science, that might have resulted in the absence of the dead hand of Islam on so many people, prevented from so many forms of artistic expression, so many avenues for free and skeptical inquiry that are necessary for the entrprise of science, so much dull fanaticism, so much boredom, so much violence, in posse and in esse) will be seen, by Berbers, by Kurds, by people in the subcontinent (why should Muslims in
India not "rediscover" their own history, their Hindu, or Buddhist, or other non-Muslim roots?), by those in Malaysia and the East Indies, with its rich pre-Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist past?

Meanwhile, start reading those Berber sites. And hope that the French state, instead of Sarkozy's folly of "integrating" its Muslims by government-supported mosques, will try to work on the Berbers, work to make them see the light, work to help them to achieve their own destiny, one diffrent from, and superior to, that of the Arabs whose method of domination comes from, is supplied by, Islam, Islam, Islam.

Go Berbers Go!

The imperialization (and colonialism) of Arab culture is something that most Muslims are almost completely unaware of.

Irshad Manji recounts an incident in her book "The Trouble with Islam" where an Arab Muslim refers to a Pakastani Muslim as "just a convert".

Yes, all Muslims are equal, but some are more equal that others.

And meanwhile, the Berbers were forbidden to use their own language, the Berber language, Tamazight, in their schools, in their institutions, and even, at times, they could be punished for using it among themselves, on the street. Berber culture was officially ignored.
this sounds very similar to what was done to the Scots and Irish who spoke Gaelic and the Welsh by the English unfortunately today both the languages are in danger of becoming dead languages and if the Berbers do not tell their arab overlords off and start teaching there children Tamazight in a few generations their language will be dead as a good example of how the cult of Islam destroys what it cannot use and like the Branch Davidians in Texas it cannot stand against a true religion like Hinduism Buddhism Judaism or Christianity because in reality all it is is something dreamed up by a madman and probably had epilepsy and was bipolar and used his cult to make himself rich

""Algerian Security Forces Weigh New Anti-Missionary Program"

...it this any different that the "old anti-missionary program"?...

Here are some interesting passages from one account, published in 2007, describing a visit to Algeria, and to Kabylia, conducted in April 2005, and what the visitor saw.

It is pretty clear that nobody is being tricked, or bribed, into becoming a Christian.

"Over 90 percent of churches in Algeria lie within the mountainous northeast area known as Kabylia. The country's 35 million population is largely made up of two people groups. The earliest, Berber-speaking residents were later conquered by Muslim Arabs, who now outnumber Berbers about five to one. The latter feel, with some justification, that they have been badly treated. Arab/Kabyle hostilities came to a head after the French left Algeria in 1962, when the new (Arab) government tried to unite the country under one language, one religion, and one culture."

"Kabyle Berbers had Christian roots and were not considered strong Muslims—even indulging in the eating of pork and drinking of beer. So the government moved Arabs into their midst and built more mosques. [NOTE THIS TACTIC WELL - dd].

"But the situation exploded in 1980 when Arabic was declared Algeria's only official language. Intellectuals who defended Berber culture were killed, and many university students died in demonstrations."

"Although the national language policy was finally amended in 2002 to include Berber, Kabylia's bitterness against all things Arab paved the way for a huge revival of Christianity. Seeds patiently sown decades earlier by missionary pioneers like the Charles Marsh family—and by the distribution of thousands of Jesus film videos and gospels in the late '90s—were finally ready to bloom." [note: those films, and gospels, were in the Berber language rather than in Arabic].

"I traveled to the epicenter of the revival *and found Kabylia felt like another country* [my emphasis added].

" Whatever I had pictured of Algeria—almost three and a half times the size of Texas and 85 percent desert—it wasn't this. Lush green mountainsides were covered with spring flowers, fig and olive trees, and grapevines. Jasmine scented the air. On the streets of Tizi Ouzo, one of the region's main cities, most men wore shirts and trousers, with relatively few sporting the long tunic and beard of fundamentalists. Some women were also heavily veiled, but the majority were colorfully clad in embroidered Kabyle dresses and Western clothes—even jeans. Fast-food restaurants and cyber-cafés abounded, and satellite dishes spread like mushrooms on the sides of high-rise apartment buildings."

"For an idea of what the Kabylia awakening looks like, turn to the Book of Acts. Believers gather daily in homes for prayer and to experience dreams, visions, healings, and deliverance. Even former terrorists, Muslim leaders, and sorcerers are coming to faith. In fact, such occurrences are so much a part of church growth that they are not regarded as extraordinary."

"The new fellowships springing up all over Kabylia are very much New Testament churches (one very good reason being that only the New Testament is yet available in the Berber language). [note: I understand that a translation of the Psalms and of other portions of the Hebrew scriptures aka 'Old Testament', are under way].

" So far they have steered clear of denominational labels and foreign leadership. Local pastors have little formal training. But as one puts it, "The Holy Spirit is more important than a certificate. Studies are important, yes, but it takes a balance. We just want to center on Jesus. The gospel has to be practical; not just words, but actions."'

And one doubts whether those actions are the kinds of actions that converts to Islam are becoming notorious for, in the West!!

A further note: although most of the new believers are of Berber ethnicity, there are also Algerian 'Arabs' who are joining the church; and indeed, the church is in some places unselfconsciously multilingual:

"Churches meet on Friday since this is the holy day for Muslims. I attended a three-hour service and enjoyed exuberant worship in three languages [presumably the three would be Arabic, French and Berber].

" Toward the end of the meeting, individuals stood to give testimonies. One Arab stated that he had been born again only that week, through a gospel message on TV. Another young man who had also just decided to follow Christ exclaimed, "I didn't think it was possible for a Muslim to become a Christian!"

One new Arab believer is described thus:
'"Dis" was from an Arab family, taught from an early age to hate Christians and Americans. "But when I learned about Jesus in the Qur'an," he explained, "I liked Him. I thought, If God gave me a choice, I would follow Jesus. He is not a man of war." [Perhaps we should read this statement in light of the ferocious Muslim-on-Muslim civil war of the 1990s, in which over 100 000 people died, many of them in gruesome massacres carried out by fanatical Jihad groups].

'The attraction grew as he listened to Christian radio. Then, one night, Dis had a vision of a heavenly being who informed him that Jesus was Lord. At that moment, his heart was transformed. Now he is full of love, not hate; dedicated to bringing reconciliation between Arabs and Kabyles.'

To put it bluntly: if Muslim opponents of this movement wish to present it as comprising people who are deluded or bribed, they are kidding themselves.

From the same article:
"The high cost of following Christ means there are few nominal believers. Christians commonly suffer beatings, lose their homes, jobs, and sometimes their lives. Yet they continue to put themselves on the line, even giving their testimonies on television."

So this is what soldiers from western countries have fought and died for.

"So this is what soldiers from western countries have fought and died for.

Posted by: Voltaire"

through the centuries, non muslim soldiers have fought to keep Muslims from invading their lands,,it remains so today....only the scope of the battle plans of the Muslims has become more apparent...