Over the past decade, an anti-Muslim movement in America has pushed for anti-Shariah laws in some 23 states and helped generate anti-mosque protests in more than 50 communities.

Even more disturbing, poisonous anti-Muslim rhetoric has contributed to an atmosphere of anger and hate that provokes acts of intimidation and violence ”“ including the recent attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin where six people were murdered, apparently because the killer confused Sikhs with Muslims.

Groups involved in the “stop Islamization of America” campaign have spent more than $40 million attempting to convince the public that American Muslims practice an inherently violent and oppressive faith that seeks to subvert the Constitution, according to a 2011 study conducted by the Center for American Progress.

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[Lamin] Sanneh acknowledges a debt to the missionary schools that unintentionally introduced him to a desiccated version of Christian faith, and he tells how as an earnest young man he wandered from pastor to pastor, desperately seeking baptism, only to be deflected by missionaries who had compromised mission in their uneasy accommodation to Islamic culture. The story would almost be humorous if it were not so sad. Yet even the account of the missionaries’ rebuff is less painful to read than the account of what he received at the hands of liberal, mainline North American pastors who had long before enmeshed themselves in their culture by reducing their ministry to caregiving rather than conversion. As for many frustrated would-be converts in our age, it was easier for Sanneh to find Christ than for him to find Christian community. Eventually he became a Catholic while at Yale.

–Will Willimon in a review of Lamin Sanneh’s new Summoned From the Margin (Eerdmans, 2012), Christian Century, the October 17th, 2012 issue, page 53 (emphasis mine)

A controversial Tanzanian Muslim cleric has been arrested for stoking religious hatred, police have said.

Sheikh Ponda Issa Ponda’s arrest comes after Muslim protesters vandalised and torched five churches in the main city, Dar es Salaam, last week.

The violence followed rumours that a Christian boy urinated on a Koran.

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Nomadic Muslim herdsmen attacked a Christian village in central Nigeria over long-running land disputes, killing at least 30 people in their latest assault, police said Wednesday.

The attack in Benue state comes as a bomb exploded Wednesday in northeast Nigeria, apparently killing a police officer and sparking reprisal attacks by the military in the region, residents said.

In Benue state, the attack Sunday targeted a rural village of Christian Tiv people called Yogbo in the state, police spokesman Daniel Ezeala said. After the attack, those living there fled, community leader Daniel Tsenghul said.

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School teacher Darlene Derosier lost her home in the 2010 earthquake that devastated her country. Her husband died a month later after suffering what she said was emotional trauma from the quake. She and her two daughters now live in tents outside Haiti’s capital, surrounded by thousands of others made homeless and desperate by the disaster.

What has helped pull her through all the grief, she said, has been her faith, but not of the Catholic, Protestant or even Voodoo variety that have predominated in this island country. Instead, she has converted to a new religion here, Islam, and built a small neighborhood mosque out of cinderblocks and plywood, where about 60 Muslims pray daily.

Islam has won a growing number of followers in this impoverished country, especially after the catastrophe two years ago that killed about 300,000 people and left millions more homeless.

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Westerners may debate how moderate Egypt’s Islamists are, but for Copts the questioning is futile. Their options are limited. While Copts are the largest Christian community in the Middle East, they’re too small to play a role in deciding the fate of the country. They are not geographically concentrated in one area that could become a safe zone. The only option is to leave, putting an end to 2,000 years of Christianity in Egypt.

The sad truth is that not all will be able to flee. Those with money, English skills and the like will get out. Their poorer brethren will be left behind.

What can be done to save them? Egypt receives $1.5 billion in U.S. aid each year, and Washington has various means to make Egypt’s new leaders listen. Islamist attempts to enshrine second-class status for Copts in Egypt’s new constitution should be stopped. Outsiders should also keep an eye on Muslim Brotherhood politicians who are planning to take control of Coptic Church finances. At a minimum, donors should demand that attacks on Copts be met with punishment as well as condemnation.

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Widespread and systematic murder and persecution by Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group in northern Nigeria, likely amount to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Government security forces have also engaged in numerous abuses, including extrajudicial killings, Human Rights Watch said.

The 98-page report, “Spiraling Violence: Boko Haram Attacks and Security Force Abuses in Nigeria,” catalogues atrocities for which Boko Haram has claimed responsibility. It also explores the role of Nigeria’s security forces, whose own alleged abuses contravene international human rights law and might also constitute crimes against humanity. The violence, which first erupted in 2009, has claimed more than 2,800 lives.

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When protests against the low-budget, anti-Islam “Innocence of Muslims” video flared across the Islamic world last month, Indonesia’s Habib Munzir Almusawa preached a different message to his tens of thousands of followers in Jakarta: Just ignore it.

“If we react so emotionally, then how can we show the good side of Islam?” Mr. Almusawa told worshipers at the al-Munawwar mosque here….

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, is seeing a wave of new, more moderate Muslim preachers, among them Mr. Almusawa. They represent a balancing of the more militant strains of Islam that have proliferated here. Ten years ago this week, Muslim extremists bombed nightclubs on the resort island of Bali, killing 202 people in the single biggest terror attack since Sept. 11, 2001, in the U.S.

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Several recent incidents in Berlin have escalated tensions between Muslims, Jews, and the city’s secular majority. Over a month ago, a rabbi wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, was beaten by four “Arab-looking” youths after being asked if he and his daughter were Jewish. Public outcry led to a large demonstration in support of Berlin’s Jews, including a flash mob of Jews and non-Jews wearing kippot. Tensions escalated days later when a second incident, in which Jewish school girls were harassed by a group of youths that included a girl wearing a head scarf, led to an exchange of harsh words between Jewish and Muslim leaders, though in neither case were the attackers caught or identified definitively. After being advised to urge greater religious tolerance, Muslim leaders denied responsibility for the attacks and pointed out their own experiences of intolerance in the city.

Then on Yom Kippur, two more anti-Semitic incidents took place””the first when a young white man threatened a local Jewish leader and told him to go back where he came from, and the second when a mother and her daughter were forced out of a taxi after telling the “German” driver they were going to synagogue. Diedre Berger of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee has now intervened, asking the German government to develop an action plan to combat anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, a contrasting alliance between Jews and Muslims has formed in the aftermath of a regional court ruling against circumcision.

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After an uprising toppled President Hosni Mubarak early last year, women and minorities hoped for a nation that would guarantee long-denied equal rights. But their pleas have gone unanswered as Egypt has shifted from military control to the conservative designs of a new Islamist president. Mostafa’s death symbolizes for many women the prospect that civil rights would be further jeopardized by a new constitution.

Scores of Egyptians, with the support of 33 women’s rights organizations, protested outside President Mohamed Morsi’s palace last week against the proposed constitution, particularly Article 36, which says the state is “committed to providing all measures to ensure the equality of women with men, as long as those rights are not contradicting the laws of Islam,” or sharia.

Overwhelmed by Islamist domination in the assembly drafting the constitution, liberals and moderates have repeatedly threatened to resign because they say the political body leans toward radical political Islam. A previous assembly was dissolved this year for failing to represent Egypt’s diverse society, and a court decision expected Tuesday could again disband the body amid charges it has ignored women, Christians, youths and other groups.

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Orient and Occident online magazine seeks to promote not just coexistence but cooperation with Muslims.
It was Egyptian media that brought the appalling “Innocence of Muslims” trailer to the wider attention of Muslims around the world. The consequences have been tragic to watch.
The country has also seen all-too-regular violent clashes between local Muslim and Christian communities, that have got no better since Egypt’s revolution.
In this difficult atmosphere, the Diocese of Egypt, under the leadership of Bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis, has relaunched a magazine online that was first started by two pioneering CMS missionaries more than 100 years ago.

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Unidentified gunmen massacred at least two dozen university students in northern Nigeria Monday night in the city of Mubi near the border with Cameroon. The attacks lasted more than an hour, with gunmen targeting specific students by name rather than indiscriminately firing.

Suspicion fell immediately on Boko Haram, a violent Islamist organization in northern Nigeria that has typically attacked Christian churches and security forces. Student leaders, meanwhile, suggested that the killings may have been tied to internal student political campaigns. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

Aside from Boko Haram’s history of bloody attacks on civilians, the very name of the group ”“ which means “Western education is a sin” ”“ stokes suspicion of their involvement. But even if the group is found to be involved, the purpose of such an attack would not be part of some global jihad.

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After spending 18 of the last 30 years in Egypt, I am not a romantic when it comes to the realities of religious intolerance, social discrimination and sectarian violence experienced by many Christians due to religious fanatics who claim to be Christian, Jewish or Muslim. I have overheard various “men of religion” refer to Christians using the religious “M” word, “mushrik” meaning polytheist and idolater or “K” word “kafr” meaning infidel. I’ve heard it all and seen a lot. While two wrongs never make a right, Christians of most denominations should never fail to recall the violence, discrimination and persecution we have been guilty of during our own 2,000 year history “in the name of God and Jesus Christ”.

I cannot speak for Muslims outside of Egypt, but I can try to explain the reactions of many to such a film without equating these reasons to being justifications. Most Americans get quite upset when we watch the American flag being burned or trampled on. We at least get upset if someone desecrates the Bible and Catholics get very upset if someone desecrates the Eucharist. Maybe we don’t burn those who do or torture them anymore, but we have in the past. We claim to be “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all” and yet we have always found at least one race, nationality, religion or orientation to focus on and “go after”.

Western societies that profess “freedom of religion” have moved toward “freedom FROM religion”. Personally, even as a Catholic priest, I feel that “religion” in civil democracies have the obligation to form and educate the individual and collective conscience of its followers and to be “a voice of conscience” in society. However, I oppose any religion dictating to government how it should legislate morality according to any particular religious belief system. At the same time, this is NOT the current reality in the Muslim world whether I/we like it or not. Cultural sensitivity must include religious and social sensitivity.

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[BOB ABERNATHY]I want to explore that with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Haris Tarin, director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Haris, how are you trying to persuade, how are American Muslims trying to persuade other Muslims around the world that putting any kind of limit on free speech is dangerous?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, I think the first way we’re trying to convince fellow Muslims of this is the fact that the idea of free speech is a foundational part of the Quran itself. We don’t only believe that in terms of Americans and our belief in the Constitution , but the Quran challenges folks to engage in dialogue and in discourse, challenges people of the same faith and various different faiths, as well. So it’s foundational to the text of Islam, we believe. The Quran actually records insults to the Prophet Muhammad himself and challenges people to engage in that discourse. So I think it’s foundational not only to the Constitution but to our sacred texts, as well.

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The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is being sued for religious discrimination. On [this past] Monday, Safiya Ghori-Ahmad’s case against the USCIRF took another step closer to trial. It is now in the hands of a federal judge to decide whether to dismiss some of Ghori-Ahmad’s complaint or allow the entire religious discrimination case to go to trial.

Ghori-Ahmad’s case against the USCIRF goes back to 2009, but it literally took an act of Congress for it to become a federal lawsuit. Congress created the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 1998 as a watchdog to investigate violations of religious liberty worldwide. But before last December, the USCIRF remained exempt from civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on religion. According to a lawsuit filed in June, the commission had a history of discrimination against Muslims, including retracting an employment offer to a researcher because of her Muslim faith and her work with a Muslim organization.

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Nigeria’s “robust” approach to neutralizing a threat posed by Islamist sect Boko Haram using military force, holding indirect talks with the group and improving education in the north is paying off, the Nigerian president said on Wednesday.

Boko Haram, which wants to carve out an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, has been blamed for more than 1,000 deaths since its insurgency intensified in 2010. The United States has designated three of Boko Haram’s senior members as terrorists.

In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders, President Goodluck Jonathan also played down the significance of the government forces’ killing of the sect’s spokesman, Abu Qaqa, in a gun battle in Kano on September 16.

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The 14-minute trailer on YouTube enraged Muslims worldwide with its depiction of Muhammad as a womanizer, religious fraud and child molester. Most Egyptian Christians in the U.S. have rejected the movie and say the man and the nonprofit tied to the film are fringe players who are not well-known in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the church for the vast majority of Coptic Christians in America.

A tiny minority of U.S. Copts, however, have used their adopted nation’s free speech protections to speak out against Islam in a way that would not be tolerated in their native Egypt. The few who engage in this anti-Muslim, evangelical activism _ including those behind the movie trailer _ are fueled by that history, said Eliot Dickinson, an associate professor of political science at Western Oregon University who has written a book on U.S. Copts.

“Whoever made this film is such an outlier in their community that it’s completely unrepresentative,” Dickinson said. “But what it does is, it taps into this frustration of always being persecuted back in Egypt and let’s not downplay that. To be a Copt in Egypt now is a very, very difficult life because, especially after the Arab Spring, it’s open season.”

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Parishioners of St Paul’s Sarhadi Lutheran Church in Mardan, Khyber Pakhthunkwa are calling for the Government to restore their church back to it’s “former glory.” The church which was built in 1937 provides education and health services to the local community ”“ Muslim and Christian alike ”“ and provided substantial support to victims of floods and a major earthquake in recent years, regardless of their religious affiliation.

During a local “protest”on Friday afternoon (21st Sept), over the release of and anti-Muslim movie called “The innocence of Muslims”, a mob broke into a church compound in Mardan near Pashawer, burnt down the church, and destroyed 27 homes in the church compound including the houses of two priests and the school head teacher. The mob burnt bibles and other religious artifacts including books with Islamic text and many question whether blasphemy charges will be laid against the those that have been caught.

The attack took place after the Government called a national holiday, purportedly in sympathy of protests against the film.

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Lahore Bishop Rt Rev Dr Alexander John Malik has strongly condemned the burning of a church in Mardan, reiterating that Pakistani Christians have nothing to do with the people who made the profane movie.

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A mob of hundreds of Muslim men attacked and burnt an 82-year-old church and an adjoining school in northwest Pakistan during a protest against an anti-Islam film, sparking concerns among the minority Christian community.

The mob broke through the gate of the St Paul’s Lutheran Church inside the cantonment in Mardan city, 48 km from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa capital of Peshawar, on Friday while returning from a rally against the film Innocence Of Muslims.

According to reports from Christians in Mardan, the mob attacked and set on fire the church, St Paul’s high school, a library, a computer laboratory and houses of four clergymen, including Bishop Peter Majeed.

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A suicide car bomber blew himself up outside a Roman Catholic church in northern Nigeria on Sunday, killing himself and at least two other people and wounding 46, police said.

Police cordoned off the area around St. John’s church after the blast, which caused minimal damage to the building but killed at least two people in a market area of Bauchi city.

A Reuters journalist saw emergency services bring out three bodies in the area, called Wunti, and police identified one as the occupant of the car that blew up.

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At least 19 people have died as violent protests erupted on the streets of Pakistan’s main cities in anger at an anti-Islam film made in the US.

Fourteen people were killed in the port city of Karachi and a further five died in the north-western city of Peshawar, hospital officials said.

Protesters clashed with police outside the diplomatic enclave in the capital, Islamabad, near the US embassy.

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

Anger over a film trailer mocking a sanctified Muslim religious figure has sparked violent protests across the Middle East that have taken the lives of dozens of people. Now, the strife is manifesting itself in the form of cyber war waged against America at home.

Over the course of this week, three major U.S. financial institutions have seen their web infrastructure targeted in technical attacks. On at least two occasions, groups or individuals claiming to be aligned with Muslims said the attacks were a reprisal for the ”˜Innocence of Muslims’ trailer that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad.

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So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

Here’s what else we learned this week about the emerging liberal consensus: That it’s okay to denounce a movie you haven’t seen, which is like trashing a book you haven’t read. That it’s okay to give perp-walk treatment to the alleged””and no doubt terrified””maker of the film on legally flimsy and politically motivated grounds of parole violation. That it’s okay for the federal government publicly to call on Google to pull the video clip from YouTube in an attempt to mollify rampaging Islamists. That it’s okay to concede the fundamentalist premise that religious belief ought to be entitled to the highest possible degree of social deference””except when Mormons and sundry Christian rubes are concerned.

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The appeal for legislation to ban the publication of material that causes religious offence was con­tained in a letter sent last weekend to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, by the President-Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusa­lem and the Middle East, the Most Revd Mouneer Anis. The other sig­natories were: the Bishop in Cyprus & the Gulf, the Rt Revd Michael Lewis; the Area Bishop for North Africa, Dr Bill Musk; and the Area Bishop for the Horn of Africa, Dr Grant Le­-Marquand.

The Bishops proposed that an “international declaration be nego­tiated that outlaws the intentional and deliberate insulting or defama­tion of persons (such as prophets), symbols, texts, and constructs of belief deemed holy by people of faith”.

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After a week of deadly international protests against an anti-Islam film, a French satirical magazine is pouring oil on the fiery debate between freedom of expression and offensive provocation.
The magazine Charlie Hebdo, which is known for outrageous humor, published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the Prophet Mohammed on Wednesday.
The issue hit the stands eight days after a video mocking the Muslim prophet triggered angry protests, including one that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

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Islamists almost by definition have a vested interest in continuously fanning the flames of Muslim victimhood. For Islamists, wrath against the West is the basis for their claim to the support of Muslim masses, taking attention away from societal political and economic failures. For example, the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference account for one-fifth of the world’s population but their combined gross domestic product is less than 7% of global output””a harsh reality for which Islamists offer no solution.

Even after recent developments that were labeled the Arab Spring, few Muslim-majority countries either fulfill””or look likely to””the criteria for freedom set by the independent group Freedom House. Mainstream discourse among Muslims blames everyone but themselves for this situation. The image of an ascendant West belittling Islam with the view to eliminate it serves as a convenient explanation for Muslim weakness.

Once the Muslim world embraces freedom of expression, it will be able to recognize the value of that freedom even for those who offend Muslim sensibilities. More important: Only in a free democratic environment will the world’s Muslims be able to debate the causes of their powerlessness, which stirs in them greater anger than any specific action on the part of Islam’s Western detractors.

Until then, the U.S. would do well to remember Osama bin Laden’s comment not long after the Sept. 11 attacks: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” America should do nothing that enables Islamists to portray the nation as the weak horse.

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It had actually been online since July, but nobody had paid attention to its crude libels against the Prophet Mohammed until Mr Abdullah’s show broadcast clips from it last weekend, calling for the film-makers to be executed.

Within hours the hardline Salafi Islamists who watch his programme, and who have been growing in strength since last year’s revolution, were demonstrating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and outside the US embassy, which they stormed on Tuesday, burning the US flag.

Thus came the spark to a week of violent protests against the film, leading to the killing of the US ambassador to Libya on Tuesday evening and assaults on Western embassies across the Middle East, leaving at least nine dead and hundreds injured.

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Christians in Nigeria are coming under siege as terrorist group Boko Haram attacks churches to try to drive out Christians and destabilise the country. The Archbishop of Jos, the Most Rev Dr Benjamin Kwashi, describes the situation in Jos, Plateau State, to Release’s Andrew Boyd.

Listen to it all (from earlier this month, but still relevant and useful for our awareness and prayers–KSH)..

The Archbishop Metropolitan and Primate of All Nigeria, Anglican Communion, Most Reverend Nicholas Okoh, on Thursday. said that the survival of the Nigerian nation and respect for human life were the two main factors restraining Christians from fighting Boko Haram which had thrown the country into an insecure state.

Primate Okoh also described the proposed bill for Fulani Commission in which government seeks to create permanent routes and reserves in all states for Fulani pastoralists as a recipe for endless crisis.

The cleric, who stated this in his primatial address during the official opening of the standing committee meeting of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion at the Cathedral Church of Emmanuel, Ado-Ekiti with the theme “…Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” called on President Goodluck Jonathan to act fast in tackling the prevailing insecurity in the nation before it gets out of hand.

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