Perspective: A storm of persecution

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If you are an Ahmadi in Pakistan, you can be sent to prison for calling yourself a Muslim, for greeting a fellow Muslim with the traditional Salaam Aleikum, for preaching your faith and for even calling your mosque a “mosque.”

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: Ottawa Citizen
By Terry Glavin | July 31, 2014

Last Sunday in Pakistan, a mob rampaged through a ghetto of the minority Muslim Ahmadi sect in Gujranwala City, looting and setting fire to houses and shops. A 55-year-old woman and her two granddaughters were burned to death. The pogrom was triggered by local Sunni clerics who said they were enraged by a “blasphemous” photograph that an 18-year-old Ahmadi man posted on his Facebook page.

If you are an Ahmadi in Pakistan, you can be sent to prison for calling yourself a Muslim, for greeting a fellow Muslim with the traditional Salaam Aleikum, for preaching your faith and for even calling your mosque a “mosque.” Over the past quarter-century, nearly 700 Pakistanis have been charged with blasphemy. More than 50 of of these accused blasphemers were murdered before their cases were heard by a judge. Twenty were given life sentences, and 16 others are on death row.

Around the same time as the Gujranwala pogrom, hundreds of fighters from the Islamist Boko Haram militia, best known for having kidnapped and enslaved more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls last April, were looting and burning Kolofata, a town in Cameroon. They murdered at least three people before withdrawing back across the border into Nigeria with several hostages, including the wife of Cameroon’s deputy prime minister Amadou Ali, a local mayor and five members of his family.

On Monday, the Chinese government’s noose-tightening repression of religious minorities sparked riots in the Kashgar prefecture of the country’s northwestern Xinjiang region that subsided only after Chinese troops opened fire and killed dozens of Muslim Uyghurs, and Beijing’s policy of  persecuting Uyghurs, Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners is now being extended in a new clampdown on the country’s 60 million Christians. Authorities have recently issued demolition orders to about 100 churches, instructing congregations to remove crosses from church buildings.

Also on Monday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that nearly 2,500 Syrians were killed during the just-concluded month of Ramadan. More than 170,000 Syrians have been killed and nearly half of Syria’s population has been displaced in the Islamist bedlam that has arisen in the wake of the democratic uprising against the Baathist dictator Bashar Assad that began three years ago.

Syria has become a charnel house of warring Sunni Islamist militias, Al-Qaida offshoots and the Tehran-backed, Beirut-based Shia terrorist organization Hezbollah. A new study by the Council of Foreign Relations concludes that Syria’s casualty toll now surpasses the carnage in Iraq over the past decade, and the various Islamist factions have attracted more foreign fighters to Syria than were engaged in the recent decades of fighting in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia combined.

Next door in Iraq, where a Syrian-Iraqi Al Qaida mutation has headquartered its cross-border “caliphate,” Islamic State fanatics are pursuing a terror campaign of firing squads, mass beheadings and crucifixions. Since Easter, tens of thousands of Christians have been hiding out in the deserts and cowering in basements, or have fled north to the safety of Iraqi Kurdistan. Nearly a million Christians have been chased out of Iraq in recent years, leaving perhaps 300,000 behind. As of this week, for the first time in 1,800 years, Mass is no longer being celebrated in the ancient city of Mosul.

“It’s tragic because it’s the largest Christian city in Iraq; it was what you call the nucleus of Christian presence for many centuries,” the Syriac Christian patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan told reporters in Washington this week. (Patriarch Younan will be visiting Ottawa next week). “And we have at least 25 churches in that city. All are abandoned. No more prayers, no services, no more Masses on Sundays in Mosul because no clergy, no people there that are Christian.”

In Europe in recent days, mobs reportedly enflamed by Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza have attacked synagogues in Paris, and rioters in Sarcelles have been heard to scream “Death to the Jews.”  Two months ago in Europe, a fanatic opened fire at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, murdering four people. A recent European Union survey found nearly a third of Europe’s Jews no longer feel safe, and are considering emigration. Thousands have already left. The latest edition of Newsweek magazine has devoted its cover story to the phenomenon. Its headline: “Exodus: Why Europe’s Jews are fleeing once again.”

“It seems like we’re living  in a world where there are all these perfect storms of religious persecution,” Andrew Bennett, Canada’s ambassador for religious freedom, told me the other day. “There’s definitely been an increase in religious persecution in the world.”

The U.S. Secretary State this week released a global study of trends in religious persecution. Its key finding:  “In 2013, the world witnessed the largest displacement of religious communities in recent memory.”

And it’s Christians who appear to be getting hit the hardest. The International Society for Human Rights reckons that Christians are the victims in four fifths of all acts of racial discrimination across the globe, while a January report by the Pew Research Center found that Christians and Muslim minorities are equally victimized in law, most noticeably in Muslim majority countries.

When Canada established Bennett’s Office of Religious Freedom last year, there was a lot of jeering about it, along with insinuations that Bennett’s own Christian background would prejudice him somehow. The carping has given way to a newfound appreciation around Ottawa for the good sense of the initiative, and since the office we established, six more countries have joined with Canada, the U.S., France and Britain in identifying religious freedom  as a foreign policy priority.

There is often little that Canada can do beyond acting as a “voice for the voiceless,” an interlocutor on behalf of persecuted minorities with the governments that discriminate against them. That is no small thing.

In the case of the Iraqi Christians, Canada has also taken in 20,000 refugees in recent years. Bennett’s office also funds human-rights research and “dialogue” forums in countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Some countries – notably Iran, China and Saudi Arabia – are simply incorrigible, and impervious to persuasion. But there is another kind of incorrigibility Bennett has to contend with, of what might be called a “domestic” variety.

“What we’re witnessing in the Middle East right now is the wiping out of close to 2,000 years of Christianity, and sometimes if feels like it’s not politically correct to talk about Christian persecution. That has to end.”

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.

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