“Any assessment of Islamic extremism will reveal a pattern of oppression and exclusion of any who differ from Islam’s religiously intractable position. Therefore, any who operate under the delusion that Islamists will promote or even tolerate other faiths are badly mistaken.”
But of course there is another born every minute.
“Gaza’s Christians,” by Elwood McQuaid in the Jerusalem Post (thanks to Ruth King):
For years realists on Middle East affairs said a Palestinian state would become a platform for radical Islamist terror and that the most dangerous merchants of death would populate the ministate created by the disastrous decisions finalized in Oslo, Norway, on August 20, 1993.
Fourteen years after Oslo, we are reaping the whirlwind of that awful agreement. Citizens of the Gaza Strip now know the force of diplomatic improprieties that crush lives and destroy future serenity.
[…]
A Hamas leader told WND that Christians can only live safely in Gaza if they accept Islamic law. The speaker was Sheik Abu Saqer, leader of Jihadia Salafiya, an Islamic movement that recently opened a “military wing” to enforce Muslim law there.
Christians in Gaza, Saqer declared, who dare to engage in “missionary activity” will be “dealt with harshly,” WND reported. Of course, women will be expected to follow the rules of Islamic dress and will not be allowed in the streets without acceptable garments. His threats came two days after a church and Christian school were attacked following Hamas’s seizure of power in the territory.
[…]
About 2,000 Christians remain in the Gaza Strip. But those numbers will soon diminish significantly.
Any assessment of Islamic extremism will reveal a pattern of oppression and exclusion of any who differ from Islam’s religiously intractable position. Therefore, any who operate under the delusion that Islamists will promote or even tolerate other faiths are badly mistaken.
To propose that organizations like Hamas be recognized as peace partners and responsible caretakers of the people over whom they rule is an embarrassment to freedom-loving people and sends a clear message to our enemies. The message is that it is okay to tell Christians and other minorities that they can kiss freedom goodbye, pack up, and get out – all with the blessing of liberal Western religionists and politicians who blindly countenance jihadist imperialism….