Church Desecration in Europe Under Islam
A few days after Muslim migrants firebombed an 800-year-old Swedish church twice over the course of four days -- once on Jan. 20, 2021 and another on Jan. 24 -- a Feb 4 report came out saying that 829 “hate crimes” against churches in Sweden have been reported between just 2012-2018, or about 138 attacks on average every year.
Thus, the churches of Sweden join those of other Western European nations that have taken in sizeable Muslim migrants. In France, for example, two churches are vandalized every day. According to a 2019 PI-News report, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17 percent increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered -- meaning such attacks are only going from bad to worse.
They are also getting increasingly vile. As one example, vandals used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nimes in 2019; consecrated bread was also found thrown outside among garbage. One week later, vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur; they mangled the arms of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner and burned altar materials.
Similar reports are coming from Germany. After reporting how four separate churches were vandalized and/or torched over the course of four weeks in 2019, PI-News, a German news site, explained: “In this country, there is a creeping war against everything that symbolizes Christianity: attacks on summit crosses, on holy figures on the way, on churches and recently also on cemeteries.”
Although mainstream media regularly claim that the vandals -- who are seldom caught to verify their identities -- are “mentally ill” or part of “right-wing extremist” groups, as the recent Swedish report states, PI-News offers a hint: “Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles lit, baptismal fonts overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like ‘Allahu Akbar.’”
Similarly, another German language report from late 2017 noted that in the Alps and in Bavaria alone, some 200 churches have been attacked and many crosses broken: “Police are currently dealing with church desecrations again and again. The perpetrators are often youthful rioters with a migration background.”
Another telling indicator is that those European regions with large Muslim migrant populations often see a concomitant rise in attacks on churches and Christian symbols. Before Christmas, 2016, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, where more than a million Muslim migrants reside, some 50 public statues of Jesus and other Christian figures were beheaded and crucifixes broken.
In 2015, following the arrival of another million Muslim migrants to Dülmen, a local newspaper said “not a day goes by” without attacks on Christian statues.
France, where one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations resides -- and where churches are attacked every single day -- is also indicative that where Muslim numbers grow, so do attacks on churches. A January 2017 study revealed that “Islamist extremist attacks on Christians” in France rose by 38 percent, going from 273 attacks in 2015 to 376 in 2016; the majority occurred during Christmas season and “many of the attacks took place in churches and other places of worship.”
As a typical example, in 2014 a Muslim man committed “major acts of vandalism” inside a historic Catholic church in Thonon-les-Bains. According to the report with pictures (since removed) he “overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras and lecterns, destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, twisted a massive bronze cross, smashed in a sacristy door and even broke some stained-glass windows.” He also “trampled on” the Eucharist.
For examples of Muslims being caught red-handed desecrating churches in other European nations, see here, here, here, here, and here.
Should there still be any doubt concerning the true identity of those most responsible for vandalizing churches throughout Europe, one need only turn to the treatment of churches in the Muslim world itself, or even in areas that have very large Muslim populations.
Thus, Muslims in Kenya torched five separate churches between Jan. 20 and Jan. 24 -- the very same days Muslims twice firebombed an 800-year-old church in Sweden. “A majority of the church members were afraid to attend services [in or near the ruins] in the aftermath of the burning of the churches, fearing that the arsonists might follow them right into their homes, risking the lives of their families,” a local source said.
As occurred when vandals in France used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in 2019, so these Kenyan arsonists also “committed the heinous acts of scooping human feces onto the buildings,” the source added.
The fact is, the vile desecration of churches has for centuries been a Muslim trademark -- a sort of “Islam was here.” As copiously documented in Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, during their invasions of Christian nations, Muslims ritually desecrated hundreds of thousands of churches (Caliph Hakim b’amr Allah alone reportedly destroyed 30,000 churches during the early eleventh century). Think what ISIS did but on an exponential level -- and not for a handful of years but for over a millennium in dozens of nations spread out over three continents.
Most recently, according to a Feb. 17, 2021 report, the ninth church to be torched in Muslim-majority Sudan recently occurred. Before it was set aflame, local Muslims shed light as to why they attack churches: “In every city or village where Muslims live, they should not allow anything that belongs to infidels such as church buildings to be there,” one Muslim wrote on social media; another insisted that, wherever Muslims allow the existence of a church, that place becomes “disgraced.” In short, and in the words of the Rev. Kuwa Shamal, of the Sudanese Church of Christ, “They targeted the church because they do not want to see any sign of the cross in the area.”
As seen from what is happening to churches throughout Western Europe, at least some Muslim migrants feel this way even when they are the minority in and guests of the West.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
The Khashoggi Passion Play
The Biden administration inflicts major damage.
The Biden administration’s decision to publish the intelligence report on Jamal Khashoggi’s death in late 2018 was as predictable as it was destructive to U.S. national security and to the security and stability of the Middle East.
It was predictable for two reasons. First, this is Obama’s third term. And in Obama’s first term he played a central role in overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the anchor of the U.S.’s alliance system in the Sunni Arab world in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological anchor of every Sunni terror group in the world.
Obama’s consistent policy for eight years was to side with the jihadists. Obama’s anti-colonialist worldview bred his anti-Western sensibilities. He and his neo-Marxist advisors viewed the jihadists as the “authentic” voice of the Islamic world. They were favored because they were “revolutionary” and anti-Western. In every conflict that pitted either conservative Sunni leaders, Iranian anti-regime forces, or Israel against jihadists from Hamas to Hezbollah, to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Houthis, to Iran, Obama and his people supported the jihadists. For this reason, Obama admired both Turkish dictator Erdogan and the Qatari ruling family. Like him, they supported jihadists.
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS) and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ) from the UAE were big problems for Obama, Robert Malley and their ilk. They appeared out of nowhere.
Young and vigorous, they seek to liberalize their conservative societies. They are deeply opposed to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. They are open to peace and cooperation with Israel. They support Israel in its campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah. And they are certainly “authentic” Arab Muslims. When the UAE declared the Muslim Brotherhood, and Obama’s key supporters and ideological allies at CAIR terrorist organizations, Obama and his comrades were so angry they could barely put together a coherent sentence.
This brings us to Khashoggi. As Lee Smith reported after he was found dead in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, there were a lot of things about Khashoggi that made him a strange hero for Americans of any stripes. He was a Qatari agent of influence. He was a former Saudi intelligence officer who sided with the Wahabist jihadists in the royal family who supported al Qaeda. He was friends with Osama bin Laden and mourned his death. The al Qaeda, ISIS, Iran and Hamas supporting Qatari regime was essentially writing his columns in the Washington Post.
On its face, Khashoggi’s receipt of a green card made no sense given his open support for al Qaeda. On its face, his gig as a columnist at Jeff Bezos’s paper made no sense given his relationship with Saudi intelligence and with the Qatari ruling family. But they made perfect sense in the context of the efforts made by Obama’s deep state friends, particularly former CIA director John Brennan, who opposed MBS from the outset to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.
When seen in this light, it is clear that Khashoggi, a terror supporting Qatari agent who opposed the modernizing, pro-American, anti-jihadist and pro-Israel Saudi Crown Prince was an important political warfare asset for Obama’s clique. His job was to discredit MBS and legitimize the terror-supporting Qataris while making pro-jihadist progressives feel good about themselves.
I’m not saying his murder was justified. I am saying he doesn’t deserve the tears of anyone who opposes jihadist terror and jihadist regimes, cares about human rights or wants to avoid a major war in the Middle East.
Whatever Khashoggi’s ties with Obama’s clique during his lifetime may have been, the way they responded to his murder made clear what they hoped to do with his death. They wanted the old, bad Saudi Arabia back. They wanted the Muslim Brotherhood funding, al Qaeda-spawning Wahabists of Riyadh back. They wanted the Prince Bandars and Prince Turkis of the days of yore, not the guy that gave women drivers licenses.
They immediately set out lionizing Khashoggi as some sort of Nelson Mandela so that they could turn MBS into Hitler or whatever. As Smith reported in another article, Robert Malley, who is now in charge of Biden’s Iran policy, was the first pushing the line that in response to Khashoggi’s death, the U.S. should end its support/alliance with Saudi Arabia in retribution and side with the Iran-controlled Houthis against Saudi Arabia.
It was a testament to Donald Trump’s common sense and his political courage that he refused to bow to their pressure. And it was equally obvious back in 2018 that if a Democrat beat Trump in 2020, the next Democrat administration would resuscitate the Khashoggi affair to try to push MBS from power.
The worst thing that happened to the Obama nee Biden crowd were the Abraham Accords. This is why the first thing that Biden and his handlers did was bow out of the U.S. side of the deal by freezing the arms sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Abraham Accords put paid their false claims that the jihadists are the authentic voice of the Arab world. The popularity of the deals among the citizens of the Gulf and much of the wider Arab world – like Morocco and Sudan — made clear that Obama (Biden) and their ilk were basing U.S. Middle East policy on the propaganda being taught in Middle East Studies departments throughout the U.S. rather than on anything even vaguely resembling the reality of the region and the views of people who actually live here.
I don’t know if MBS will survive this blow or not. There is reason to fear that at the end of the day, the leaders of the UAE and of Saudi Arabia will decide they are better off making an arrangement with Iran supported by the U.S. than standing up for their sovereignty and their interests with Israel. And if they do, it will be a disaster of epic proportions. The danger of war will rise exponentially. Jihadists of the Sunni and Shiite varieties will be empowered as never before. And Israel will be in a pretty horrible position.
But in the midst of all of this, leave it to the fake human rights activists and real terror supporters and jihad sympathizers like Malley and his comrades in Obama’s new administration to pat themselves on the back for ushering in an “authentic” era in the Middle East.
- A couple of additional thoughts on the administration’s sudden efforts to overthrow MBS.
First, by branding MBS a murderer, the administration is making it politically unfeasible for Israel to make peace with Saudi Arabia. This brings me back to my earlier point about the administration’s efforts to undermine and hopefully destroy the Abraham Accords. Hours before the administration opened this shocking offensive against MBS, I24 news reported that Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain were establishing a NATO-like military alliance. I wouldn’t be surprised if the two stories were related. Now that the administration has criminalized MBS, with the avid support of its fully mobilized media attack dogs and a stable of fake human rights groups, it can use any move towards formalizing Israel-Saudi ties as “proof” that Israel is immoral.
MBS will become a new version of Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese leader Christian leader who signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1982 only to be assasinated. Any move MBS makes towards Israel will be attacked by the progressive left and their Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian regime regime fellow travelers in Washington.
So the move against MBS is a move to block further progress towards ending the Arab conflict with Israel.
The second aspect of the U.S. move that is worth noting is that its impact so far has been the opposite of what Biden and his handlers no doubt expected. Rather than express contrition or accept guilt of any sort, the Saudis have rejected the U.S. findings and said that they will not allow the U.S. to overthrow the Crown Prince. The UAE and Bahrain have issued similar responses. Trump spent an enormous amount of time and effort working to rebuild U.S. credibility with its Middle East allies after eight years of Obama’s betrayal. The Saudis and Egyptians did trust Trump, but scarred from eight years with Obama, they were unwilling to place all of their eggs in the U.S. basket. As a consequence, Russia and China expanded their arms sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE during Trump’s tenure.
The Biden administration seems not to have considered that freezing U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE doesn’t freeze arms sales, it just freezes the U.S. out of the regional arms market. So the first victim of Biden’s policies will be U.S. arms manufacturers. And the damage they incur will likely be longstanding. No matter how hard the next Republican administration works, it will be much more hard pressed than Trump was to rebuild America’s credibility in the Middle East.
Israelis are not responding to Biden’s pro-Iran policies with hysteria. They are simply rejecting his policies.
This doesn’t mean that Biden and Malley et.al., can’t do major damage. They can and they are. It does mean that they are much less powerful than they think they are.
Biden Returns to Obama’s Feckless Foreign Policy
No worse friend, no better enemy.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
It was said of the Roman generalissimo Sulla that there was no better friend or worse enemy than he. This maxim of foreign policy––support and help your loyal allies, and damage and punish your enemies––was proven common sense for millennia. Then came the age of moralizing internationalism, the belief that a “new world order” had made that realist truth anachronistic and primitive, a reflection of our benighted past. Now diplomatic engagement, democracy promotion, foreign aid, and multinational institution see to global security, peace, and prosperity.
As a result, today there is no worse friend, and no better enemy than the West’s foreign policy and national security agencies.
Our foreign policy establishment has long clung tightly to these outworn “new world order”
narratives and paradigms despite the empirical evidence that such appeasing policies embolden and strengthen our enemies and convince them of our weakness. Exhibit number one is Obama’s involvement of the U.S. in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or Iran nuclear deal, a multinational compendium of empty promises, unenforceable conditions, and American danegeld. By the end of Obama’s second term it was obvious that Iran had no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons programs, its development of missiles to carry nuclear warheads, and its jihadist aggression in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen fomented by its proxies.
The last four years provide the evidence of that foreign policy failure. Donald Trump’s more realist Middle East policies signaled to the world that the U.S. was no long an indulgent, dotty Uncle Sam who would ignore provocations and assaults on our security and interests, or reward with foreign aid empty promises scrawled on “parchment barriers.” Instead of the wishful thinking of “diplomatic engagement,” Swiss-cheese agreements, and unreciprocated concessions, Trump took decisive action. He left the Iran nuclear agreement, imposed harsh sanctions on the regime, and punished its aggression with direct attacks on Iranian Republican Guard leaders, the most serious being the killing of Qassem Soleimani, head honcho of Iran’s imperialist Quds Forces abroad.
Now we have Joe Biden as Commander-in-Chief, whom ex Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” So of course, Biden is returning to his old boss Obama’s failed foreign policy on Iran. This reverse of Trump’s successful approach will accelerate the mullahs’ development of nuclear weapons, even as it jeopardizes the security and interests of our regional allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, both of which Iran has named as targets for annihilation, and both of whom Biden has snubbed.
Biden apologists, of course, are trumpeting the recent airstrike on weapon depts and a convoy on the Syria-Iraq border as a bold act of deterrence. But consider the equation: Iranian proxies kill and wound Americans, and we retaliate by killing other Iranian proxies. That’s not even tit-for-tat, let alone the calibrated escalation of punishment needed to deter more attacks. Iran has a lot of proxies it can spare, and is happy to spend a few as a cheap price for bearding the American lion and putting our weakness on global display.
True deterrence comes from making such aggression more costly and painful, as the Soleimani killing did. You kill Americans, we kill high profile Iranians, not disposable proxies whom Iran uses as cannon fodder. Biden needs to take lessons from Israel, which in 2020 alone hit 50 targets in Syria not just to retaliate for aggression, but to preempt future attacks from Iran’s proxies.
The mildness of Biden’s response, moreover, has had no impact on Iran’s behavior. Indeed, Iran has scorned Biden’s outreach to start negotiations over the JCPOA; blew off an EU meeting on reviving the nuclear plan, a meeting that Biden publicly committed the U.S. to attend; denied the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors access to nuclear facilities; and is threatening to enrich uranium to the 60% weapons-grade level.
Biden’s response? He announced that Washington can’t “snap back” sanctions on Iran in retaliation for violating the agreement, and is trying to get South Korea to unfreeze $1 billion of Iranian money. Meanwhile, Iran remains adamant that there will be no negotiated settlement and no concessions unless all its demands are met, which means a return to the old flawed agreement, and a removal of Trump’s punitive sanctions that had Iran on the ropes.
Biden’s blunders matter because Iran isn’t just America’s or Israel’s problem. A nuclear-armed Iran, given its proximity to vast oil reserves and shipping lanes, will be a danger to the whole “rules-based international order,” not just to the interests and security of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. It’s bad enough when a pygmy-state like North Korean, one on permanent life-support from China, acquires a nuclear weapon and becomes virtually untouchable. But corrupt thugocracy living large is unlikely to commit suicide by testing our nuclear resolve.
But Iran is a much more consequential enemy, one that our Western categories of secularism and globalism cannot understand in its own terms. Apart from possessing the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, Iran is an adherent of one of history’s most successful imperialist faiths, which conquered, occupied, and colonized two-thirds of the Roman Empire. Its tenets make such conquest and Islamization a divine imperative, as encoded in Muhammed’s proclamation, “I was told to fight all men until the say there is not god but Allah.”
This command has been repeated over the centuries down to our own times, when the leader of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, announced that “we shall export our revolution to the whole world.” And if apologists want to misinterpret that promise as referring to mere proselytizing, Khomeini also said, “Kill all the unbelievers as they would kill you!” Iran has made good on that precept for over forty years, using proxies like Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, who in 1983 murdered 241 American troops in Beirut, and are still killing Americans today.
An enemy that declares war on you, proves it by killing your citizens and allies for decades, and actively seeks weapons of mass destruction to hasten its apocalyptic end of history when the whole world becomes slaves of Allah, you’d better take him at his word rather than rationalize or attribute his behavior to anti-colonialist grudges, the lack of democracy, or perceived slights to his religion. Under foreign policies of both parties our country has failed at its highest duty, to keep its people safe from its enemies by confronting threats directly rather than avoiding the reckoning by relying on the magical-thinking of diplomatic engagement and concessions to a committed enemy.
That’s being no better enemy––one that serves its rivals’ interests at our own expense.
As for being no better friend, such loyalty to allies is predicated on their reciprocity. As of now, we are getting little help from our allies––meaning NATO countries–– whom the New World Order clerks allege Trump so callously and stupidly alienated. But allies deserve consideration when they collaborate on policies that affect the alliance as whole, and don’t sacrifice our interest to theirs. The Europeans may think that Iranian nuclear weapons would not threaten them, but that would be gross negligence of the obligation to both their allies and their own peoples whom it is their duty to keep from harm.
And a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten Europe. The mullahs don’t like the EU any more than they do the U.S. Both represent the Christian West that starting in the late 17th century began the incursion of European powers into the House of Islam, relegating Muslim nations to backward client-states of the same infidels who for a thousand years trembled at the approach of Islam’s warriors, privateers, and slavers.
Yet despite that threat, England, France, and Germany undermined Trump’s attempt to get our “allies” to see past their parochial commercial interests and help check this potential threat. They have created financial work-arounds to help Iran avoid sanctions, and refused to put their economic weight behind Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on the regime. Nor should we be surprised. Despite the globalist, one-world rhetoric of the Davoisie, sovereign nations accountable to voters pursue their own interests as they understand them. That’s what it means to be “sovereign.”
The problem arises when such allies are reaping disproportionate benefits from their most important ally, the U.S. The over 80 years of military and financial support for the European nations has earned us some consideration for our interests and security, particularly when in a globally integrated economy both are bound up with Europe’s. But whether it’s facilitating Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or Russia’s bid to increase its leverage over Europe’s energy supplies with the Nord Stream pipeline, or China’s gaining access to European investment capital with the recently signed EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investments, some European nations are risking not just their own interests and security, but ours as well.
Donald Trump corrected a lot of these dysfunctions that follow from globalist wishful thinking replacing realist assessments of other nations’ behavior and motives. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is now taking us back to the days of Barack Obama’s dangerous mistakes. And the Republicans? Twenty-seven Republican Senators voted to confirm a veteran of Obama’s malfeasance as Biden’s Secretary of State.
What kind of message does that send to the world? That we’re no worse friend as well as no better enemy.
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