It’s nice of dolgwan to show up and demonstrate precisely why the distinction Kimstu made is significant. Because while there are certainly many cases of people being killed because they were Christian, there are almost no cases where the people killing the Christian would not also have gladly murdered my queer atheist ass. And yet people like dolgwan use those statistics to try to argue that Christianity is especially persecuted, which is patently ridiculous.
I guess it’s OK to be racist against blacks as long as you hate Mexicans too.
I know right? It’s like gays in the US complaining about how bigoted Klan types have persecuted them, when those same people would lynch my black pagan ass in a second and I am not even gay.
You might take a second and think about it before you just go ahead and accept accept the assumption of Boko Haram that things like immunizing infants, teaching girls to read anything other than the Koran, and allowing women to leave the house are part of a Western Colonialist plot.
Fortunately, no-one’s persecuted for being gay in the US - they’re persecuted for not being straight. The people who persecute gays would just as happily persecute lesbians, bisexuals, transfolk or genderqueers.
Things were much better a few hundred years ago when most Christians killed because of their faith were killed by other Christians of a slightly different faith.
None of those deaths count, because they also targeted Jews.
Regards,
Shodan
Miller, I can certainly sympathize with how you feel particularly since his post was rather odd, but based on that logic it’s wrong to classify the Jewish victims of Auschwitz as being killed because they were Jews since the Nazis also would have killed you for being gay.
I’m almost mathematically certain you don’t believe that though you could reasonably argue the gay, gypsy and Jehovah’s Witness victims are often ignored and in many cases deliberately so.
I’ve never heard of any gays talking about gays getting murdered by the Klan and ignoring their long history of murdering blacks.
I’m also not sure that most gay bashers in America would do the same to blacks.
For example maybe the murderers of Matt Shepherd would have killed him if he was black and straight, but unless the allegations of The Book of Matt are correct, I doubt it.
For that matter, plenty of gay bashers have been black.
So? This is a kind of bizarre statement.
Anyway, I was simply making the same point that you are in post 48.
You mean in the countries where we hadn’t been driven out, right?
*hums “National Brotherhood Week” *
Ok, so the OP addressed a claim of 150,000 Christians killed each year for their beliefs. Iggy came back with multiple links covering Boko Haram, a militia active in northern Nigeria. The thread began in September 2012.
I say that when an Islamic group launches a planned attack against attenders of a church service that it can be fairly interpreted as a bigoted attack. So some Christians are indeed murdered for their faith.
Over at wikipedia, I see that Boko Haram has killed about 320 people per year between 2009 and 2013. They attack and bomb Christians and churches, but also schools and police stations. Remember their name means, “Western education is sinful”. They have assassinated members of the Islamic establishment - not pure enough it seems. They may practice ethnic cleansing against the Hausa and Fulani peoples. Unsurprisingly mainstream Muslim groups denounce them.
So we have one local terrorist group with a varied agenda who murder Christians and others. They demonstrably are not as focused as the KKK was, though they do murder Christians for their religion in my view. My problem is that their Christian attacks < 320 << 150,000. And northern Nigeria != worldwide.
I do feel the situation in Nigeria is unfortunate and that fundamentalists like Boko Haram play a less than constructive role in the country.
I don’t know how far outside the mainstream Boko Haram is among Muslims in Nigeria, considering 71% of them favor implementing sharia.
Pakistan church bomb: Christians mourn 85 killed in Peshawar suicide attack
A wide net was cast to come up with the 150k number, obviously, but the true tally might be closer than we think.
And even then it is questionable. Sometimes churches are just convenient places to attack a group of people because they are of a different ethnic group, not because they are Christian. In fact, sometimes the clergy helped with the killings.
These catholic priests who were killed were killed for being of the wrong ethnic group, not for being Christian. And other priests aided in the killing of other ethnic groups.
Religion may be one point in the identification of the target group without being the only one, the main one or even a necessary one in which case they were not killed for being Christian as much as killed for being Tutsi. And even “killed by Christians for being Tutsi”.
Looking at the Wikipedia page on them they seem to be quite a bit crazier than just that. I especially like this tidbit:
That page has an interesting chart which shows that in pretty much all Muslim countries, with very few exceptions, between 1/2 and 3/4 of Muslims believe Sharia should apply only to Muslim believers and not to others. This pretty much negates the “they want to impose their religion on us”. They don’t even want to impose their laws which they consider religious.
This is clearly a killing of Christians for being Christians but note the main motivation is not that they are Christians, the motivation is a revenge for drone killings which they feel target Muslims. In other words, they are saying: “Until you stop killing Muslims we will kill Christians”.
No, it is not close at all. And, again, it is mostly ethnic violence of which religion is just one component. How many Muslims has America killed in the last 12 years?
Like you and a few others, I’m getting a weird sense in this thread that many posters are bending over backwards to find reasons why Christians are not being persecuted for their beliefs anywhere.
Is it a reaction to the persistent cries of persecution in countries where they do not face persecution?
You are misrepresenting the data. When they say that sharia should only be applied to Muslims this does not mean to Muslim believers as you state but to anyone born Muslim. This becomes clear when you realize that the sharia they favor includes the death penalty for leaving Islam, which makes no sense at all if non-believers are exempt from the laws. Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim in Malaysia
The Taliban’s demands include non-Muslim’s giving up the right to live as equal citizens, so it is not that easy to untangle the different motivations. For the most part, the motive is because the drones are very successful against the Taliban leadership, not because they are attacking Muslims per say. In essence they see the Christians (and the Pakistani government) there as part of an other that include the USA, and they are lashing out at them/us for defending themselves.
More specifically, I think, it is that the loudest voices condemning persecution of Christians include those who people rightly suspect would do their own persecuting if given the chance.
Miller, can you provide any references to Islamic fundamentalists stating publically that they would “murder your queer atheist ass”? On the other hand, the annihilation of the Christian community in Eygpt is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s raison d’etre.