Father Christopher Zugger

New events from the Muslim world re: Christians.

In Pakistan, a Muslim man grabbed an 18 year old Catholic off the motorbike which she was riding with her mother. He hauled into bushes in order to rape her. After a Muslim man rapes a woman, she can be sent to prison for sexual misconduct and is only spared if she marries the man. Since a Muslim man can not marry a Christian, the Christian victim must abandon her faith. So rape victims are penalized three times: rape, forced marriage, and forced conversion.

You can read about her here: http://www.aina.org/news/20111205163311.htm  and here: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Faisalabad,-18-year-old-Christian-woman-killed-during-an-attempted-rape-23336.html

The Catholics call her a martyr for purity.  The Muslim community has said nothing.

One week ago, a Muslim preacher in northern Iraqi the town of Zakho delivered a fiery sermon at the mosque against a Muslim-owned massage parlor which he accused of promoting prostitution. A huge mob of men and boys flooded the streets of Zakho in righteous indignation — and destroyed stores owned by Christians and Yezidis.  On this Assyrian Christian website, you can see several videos of the destruction: http://www.americanmesopotamian.org/aspx/m/882488

The mullah denies responsibility for the violence. The mob tried to enter the Christian quarter, only to be turned back by armed guards.  Christians usually are not armed – they are members of a religion which preaches peace but are the victims over and over of extremists of the other religion which claims to preach peace in Iraq.

It is worth noting that while Christians do own liquor stores, the Christian community is not large enough to support the large number of liquor stores in Arab towns. Who are their customers?  Muslim men.  While this is never said publicly, since Muslim men are not allowed to drink alcohol, the hypocrisy of the mullahs’ who denounce Christian stores is pretty obvious. They never go to their faithful and tell them to clean up their act. Rather, they encourage destruction like this.

Look at those videos, the cries of triumph as yet another storefront is forced open, the fires, the stamping on products with their feet – what would you do if you saw a mob like this running toward you? This is the fear that Christians in Iraq and Pakistan and Egypt live with daily.  One agitated sermon: all hell breaks loose.  One rapist: your daughters can be kidnapped right in front of you and you can do nothing.  We have it very easy here – and come up with a hundred excuses to demand shorter sermons, to skip going to church because it is inconvenient. And these people pay with their lives regularly for adhering to Christ.  What do we suffer here?