Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Crucified Again


Crucified Again
Crucified Again

by Raymond Ibrahim

Hardcover  •  2013  •  $27.95 ISBN: 978-1-62157-025-7 

Two thousand years after St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death for his faith, Christians are once again being systematically persecuted on a large scale and with lethal cruelty. Their antagonists? Adherents of radical Islam.
The violent persecution of Christians by Muslims is now a global human rights crisis, but it has received little attention in the mainstream press. Americans were shocked in 2012 to learn that a Christian pastor was sentenced to death in Iran for his faith; but few had heard about the thirty other documented cases of severe persecution of Christians in Muslim countries that were happening at the same time. Churches burned to the ground, crucifixes and Bibles confiscated and destroyed, and Christians tortured, raped or killed for their faith are chillingly regular events in Muslim countries, sometimes even encouraged or enabled by the governments themselves.
This book should be compulsory reading for anyone concerned about terrorism and horrific human rights abuses. Political correctness and terrified media sources try to deny these barbaric and shocking acts are by "extremists" with British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a speech to the Munich security conference in 2011, said, "We have got to get to the root of the problem, and we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of where these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism. We should be equally clear what we mean by this term, and we must distinguish it from Islam. Islam is a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people. Islamist extremism is a political ideology supported by a minority. At the furthest end are those who back terrorism to promote their ultimate goal: an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of Sharia. Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist worldview, including real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values." *
High time for western media and politicians to stop cowering in fear and admit that this persecution exists. The attacks in Australia, Denmark, France and Canada certainly reveal this is just not a US problem, but a world problem.
Kudos for Mr Ibrahim for the courage to bring this difficult topic to the world. 


* Atlantic Magazine