By Lela Gilbert
FoxNews.com
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Oct. 10, 2013: Malala Yousafzai poses for photographs in New York. Yousafzai, was shot by the Taliban for her advocating education for girls. (AP)
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Sept. 27, 2013: Malala Yousafzai listens as Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust introduces her to reporters at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
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Sept. 27, 2013 – Malala Yousafzai addresses students and faculty after receiving the 2013 Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Award at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The Pakistani teenager, an advocate for education for girls, survived a Taliban assassination attempt last year on her way home from school. (AP)
Thanks to Facebook I watched the unforgettable clip of Jon Stewart’s touching interview with Malala Yousafzai this week on “The Daily Show” just this morning.
I was reminded of Malala’s story — she became a well-known champion of women’s education as an eleven-year-old child in Pakistan, writing her own blog and demanding education for girls in her Swat Valley community.
Then almost exactly a year ago, she was rewarded for her efforts with a Taliban bullet to the head. For a few days her life hung in the balance. She survived, thanks to a gifted British medical team.
Is it safer for the Nobel Committee to ignore the reality of radical Islamist violence than to risk putting a spotlight on it?
And now on Wednesday – sixteen-years-old and gracefully garbed in a sparkling orange veil – Malala left the irrepressible Jon Stewart speechless.
The audience couldn’t stop applauding.
We were all captivated. This amazing young woman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
She had to win!
Only a few minutes after watching the clip, I got an email announcing the Nobel Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision: the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), located in The Hague, had been awarded the 2013 prize.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only person whose first reaction was a disappointed shrug.
Really?
How could that brilliant, courageous Pakistani girl be overlooked in favor of some faceless, virtually anonymous agency?
Questions linger. While we can only speculate one can’t help but wonder if there is a political reason why the secretive Norwegian Nobel Committee turned a blind eye to this daring young woman, a target of radical Islamist terrorists?
Scandinavia has certainly seen its share of Muslim rage. Riots raging in Malmo, Sweden. An epidemic of rapes in Norway. Seemingly endless threats and attempted assaults over the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammed in Denmark.
Meanwhile, the progressive leadership in the region has persistently clung to the idea that these events have been symptoms of economic inequality, not of any politico/religious agenda against western culture.
Is it safer for the Nobel Committee to ignore the reality of radical Islamist violence than to risk putting a spotlight on it?
Is it more comfortable to brush off Malala Yousafzai’s story as an unfortunate but isolated incident in some remote village?
Or is it simply politically incorrect to applaud her?
Malala has, indeed, put a face on the threat of terrorism, on the absence of women’s rights in radical Muslim countries, on the bloodthirsty mindset of those who hate western ideas – such as education – and on the indomitable courage of a real, modern-day heroes.
It’s true that the Nobel, once the gold standard for international achievement, has lost some of its luster in recent decades. But it still retains prestige, having once rewarded such giants as Andrei Sakarov, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Elie Weisel and more.
So why not Malala?
Naturally there are those who approved of this year’s decision.
The Guardian praised it, calling the OPCW “an unshowy agency” with a “striking success record.”
The immediacy of the Syrian crisis over chemical weapons and their destruction, which is now reportedly underway, could explain the focus on this otherwise obscure group, implying that the decision was made quite recently.
Even before the decision was announced, Tilman Brueck, head of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, stated that the prize should not go to Malala. Brueck told Norwegian news agency NTB that, “I’m not sure it would be suitable, from an ethical point of view, to give the peace prize to a child.”
Never mind the oft-repeated prophecy of future world peace inIsaiah 11:6 “The wolf will live with the lamb; the leopard will lie down with the young goat. The calf and the lion will graze together,and a little child will lead them.’
Asked by host Jon Stewart what she would do if confronted by attackers, Malala explained why she should not use violence:
“If you hit a Talib, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty…You must fight others through peace and through dialogue and through education.
“I would tell him how important education is and that I would even want education for your children as well. That’s what I want to tell you,” she imagined telling her assailant, before adding, “now do what you want.”
If that’s not the embodiment of “peace,” I don’t know what is.
Lela Gilbert is author of “Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner” and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of “Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.” She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Instituteand lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website:www.lelagilbert.com.
Book Launch
Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner
By Lela Gilbert
“A new, mesmerizing book by Lela Gilbert” – Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
“Saturday People, Sunday People is elegantly written, historically important, and politically relevant.” – Shoshana Bryen, Jewish Policy Center
“Lela Gilbert’s is a voice that deserves to be heard. If “progressive” Westerners could set aside their anti-Israeli and anti-evangelical biases long enough to read her book, they would learn (and, more importantly, unlearn) a great deal about an important yet chronically misunderstood part of our world.” – Joseph S. Spoerl, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Jewish Political Studies Review
Sunday, October 6, 2013
5:30pm Reception
6:00pm Event
Speakers:
Opening remarks: Yisrael Medad, Begin Center
Introduction: Daphne Netanyahu, editor-in-chief of the on-line Hebrew weekly Maraah Magazine www.maraah-magazine.co.il/
Author Interview: Lela Gilbert with Ruthie Blum, Columnist for Israel Hayom; author of To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the Arab Spring
RSVP: 02-565-2011
Free of charge. Event will be in English.
Books will be available for sale at significant discount.
By Lela Gilbert
The sights, sounds and scents of Jerusalem are kaleidoscopic and ever changing. When I first arrived in Israel in 2006, I realized that it would take a lifetime to see and appreciate the endless array of cityscapes, holy sites, museums, gardens, archeological digs and – most wonderful of all – the colorful people that surrounded me.
I suppose that’s why I wasn’t all that impressed at the sight of some ugly, spray-painted graffiti a friend pointed out to me in Bethlehem. “It’s Arabic,” she explained. “And it means, ‘First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.’”
“And that means…what?”
“It’s a jihadi slogan. It means, more accurately, ‘On Saturday we kill the Jews; on Sunday we kill the Christians.’”
That was outrageous. But like a lot of new things, it was soon eclipsed by other discoveries. In fact, I forgot about it altogether till I attended IDC’s Herzliya Conference in 2009 – an annual policy and strategy gathering. That year, I wandered into a panel discussion about something I’d never heard of – “The Forgotten Refugees.”
Jewish friends and colleagues are puzzled by what appears to be a lack of anxiety, action or advocacy on the part of Western Christians for believers in the Middle East.
I was bewildered watching panelists and participants, who were speaking with great emotion about Jews – often themselves and their families – who fled Muslim lands between 1948 and 1970. What were they talking about?
Short version: after seeing their friends and loved ones imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed, 850,000 Jews left behind their homes and millennia of history with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Many are now in Israel.
But it wasn’t until I actually began to research the story of those “Forgotten Refugees” that I began to understand the slogan: “On Saturday we kill the Jews.” Why? Because with virtually no Jews left to persecute in those Muslim countries, “On Sunday we kill the Christians.”
A few examples:
In 1948 there were about 135,000 Jews in Iraq. Today less than 10 Jews remain.
Since 2003, more than half of Iraq’s Christian population of 800,000 has fled. One horrific church bombing October 31, 2010, killing 58, made the news. But there was much more. As international human rights lawyer Nina Shea testified in a Congressional hearing:
“…In August 2004…five churches were bombed in Baghdad and Mosul. On a single day in July 2009, seven churches were bombed in Baghdad…The Archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped and killed in early 2008. A bus convoy of Christian students were violently assaulted. Christians…have been raped, tortured, kidnapped, beheaded, and evicted from their homes…”
In 1948, there were some 100,000 Jews in Egypt. Today there are less than 50.
Since late 2010, Egypt’s Coptic Christian community – 8,000,000 strong – has been under assault – tens of thousands have fled.
In recent months, the Christians have been blamed for the demise of the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime.
In the span of just three days, between August 14 and 16, 38 Churches were destroyed; 23 were vandalized. Fifty-eight Coptic homes were burned and looted. Eighty-five Copt-owned shops, 16 pharmacies and 3 hotels were demolished. Six Christians were killed; seven Copts were kidnapped.
In 1948, there were around 30,000 Jews in Syria. Today less than a dozen remain.
Now hundreds of thousands of Syrian Christians have fled; others are bleeding and dying, often targeted by Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels who demand that they convert to Islam or die.
And elsewhere? Just this past Saturday, a massacre in a Nairobi mall took the lives of 68 people. Their al-Shabab killers ordered all Muslims to safely leave the scene; they shot the rest.
On Sunday, more than 80 Pakistani Christians were killed in a church bombing.
Jewish friends, neighbors and colleagues are shocked but not entirely surprised by such stories. They are rather puzzled, however, by what appears to be a lack of anxiety, action or advocacy on the part of Western Christians.
“Yes, it’s horrific,” we seem to be saying, “But what can we do?”
If we Sunday people are indeed concerned about the survival of our ancient communities in the Middle East, we may want to heed the advice of the Saturday people:
Pray as if everything depends on God. And act as if everything depends on you.
Lela Gilbert is author of “Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner” and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of “Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.” She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Instituteand lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website:www.lelagilbert.com.
By Julie Stahl and Scott Ross
CBN News Jerusalem Bureau
Friday, July 26, 2013
Print 9 Comment(s)
http://www.cbn.com/tv/2566061630001
JERUSALEM, Israel — Persecution of Jews and persecution of Christians: Is there a link between the two? Journalist Lela Gilbert says yes.
Gilbert has written extensively about the global assault on Christians around the world. She recently spoke with CBN’s Scott Ross about her latest book, Saturday People, Sunday People.
The California author arrived in Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon for a three-month visit. Today, she spends much of her time in Jerusalem. She shared with Ross about radical Islamic plans to first rid the Middle East of Jews and then of Christians.
But first, she said she has noticed that persecution by Islamists is not the only challenge for Christians in Jerusalem.
Disunity Among Christians
Ross: There are many Christian sects, denominations, etc, in this Land, how are they doing with one another?
Gilbert: Not too well. They’re not doing much better than the ones in America.
Ross: It was Nehemiah that said, look we’re divided on the wall one from another and how are they going to do battle if they don’t have one mind and one strategy, one approach to everything? One! Jesus prayed it.
Gilbert: You know you’ve got Christians arguing about prophecy, I mean, evangelicals arguing about all kinds of things, much less the old churches who have ancient rifts within themselves – that go back to the fourth century. So it’s not surprising but what we know is that we all look pretty much the same through a jihadi rifle site. And maybe we need to remember that.
Ross: Are you hopeful?
Gilbert: I’m hopeful because of my faith in the Lord and in His way of working things out. Politically, I can’t understand what’s going to happen…my hope is in Him…He’s worked in my life in so many miraculous ways that I have to believe He’s going to work amongst His people and bring them together and protect them.
Her New Book
Ross: And now out of all this, a book. I was fascinated by the title define that significance.
Gilbert: It’s graffiti from radical Islamists that appears throughout the Middle East. In the best terms it says, “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.” But there’s a flag, a photo of a flag in the book that says, “On Saturday we kill the Jews, on Sunday we kill the Christians.” And that’s where I got the title.
Gilbert said even though many of the world’s Muslims are not violent, their voice is drowned out by radical elements.
Buy the Book:
ShopCBN: Saturday People, Sunday People
Event, July 19:
Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner
http://www.heritage.org/events/2013/07/saturday-people
Long fascinated by the land of Israel, Lela Gilbert arrived there on a personal pilgrimage in August 2006 – in the midst of a raging war. In Saturday People, Sunday People, she offers a unique portrait of Israel as seen through the eyes of a Christian who came for a visit and has stayed on for more than six years. While most people see Israel as an abstraction centering on international conflicts of epic proportions, Gilbert reflects on the vibrant country that she found – a story of the real Israel and of real Israelis.
Gilbert weaves together not only a memoir of her experiences, but also a rich account of past and present events that continue to shape the lives of Israelis and the world beyond their borders. Included is a story that has all but vanished into history: the persecution and pogroms that drove more than 850,000 Jews from Muslim lands between 1948 and 1970 – the “Forgotten Refugees.” Their experience is now repeating itself among Christian communities in the same region – a cruel pattern that embodies the Islamist slogan calling for the elimination of “first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”
Lela Gilbert is a free-lance writer and editor and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Included among her previous books are: Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (co-authored, Thomas Nelson, 2013), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion (co-authored, Oxford University Press, 2008), and Baroness Cox: Eyewitness to a Broken World (Lion-Hudson, 2007). She is a contributor to numerous news publications including the Jerusalem Post, The Weekly Standard, Jewish World Review, and National Review Online (NRO).
Link to original story.
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/saturday-people-sunday-people-ruth-king.html
June 1, 2013
An underreported tragedy of the Middle East is the persecution and exodus of Christian communities that have lived there for centuries, some for millennia, well before the advent of Islam. The irony is that today Israel is the only country where the Christian population is growing. The sorry exception is in the Arab controlled regions of Judea and Samaria.
Lela Gilbert, in her inspiring book Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes ofa Christian Sojourner, describes her life in a country she came to visit but now makes her home.
Although Gilbert grew up in a family supportive of Israel, for her the defining moment was Israel’s triumph in the 1967 War–whose 46th anniversary will be celebrated on June 5th this year. She watched with concern as, in the following decades, Israel’s enemies increased in number, with Muslims joined by fellow travellers throughout the world, including the leadership of the mainline churches who shrugged off the fiercest faith driven diatribes against Jews, Christians and other “infidels.”
Alarmed by these trends, in 2006 Gilbert decided to visit the land that fascinated her as a writer and as a practicing Christian. To her family’s surprise and to Israel’s great benefit, Gilbert would be no ordinary tourist. She rented a flat in Jerusalem and began her sojourn. She currently divides her time between Jerusalem and California.
What is amazing about this book is the way Lela Gilbert resonates to Israel’s dangers, its security concerns, its diversity, its army, its vitality and its destiny, feeling them as her own. In her words: “….I came with the conviction that an assault upon Jews is an implicit assault upon Christians, since it strikes at the root of the same ancient tree.” She experiences the hypocrisy, the lies and libels of the world’s “enlightened” elite; she feels horror at the unspeakable jihadist terrorists who murdered the Fogel family including women and babies in their beds. She absorbs “the heavy weight of sadness pressed against the whole country.” She also has witnessed the fear of Christians in PA-ruled Bethlehem, similar to the fear of Christians throughout the Muslim world–in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Lela Gilbert also experiences the holiness of Israel, the eternal miracle of the Sabbath in Jerusalem, the joys of Passover and Sukkot, the renewal and commitment of Tisha B’av and the optimism that pulses through Israel with the belief that the best is still to come.
With the Bible as her GPS, Gilbert has visited every corner of Israel and spoken to Israelis–and Arabs–from every background. She has visited the “settlements” of Judea and Samaria–from the handsome villas of the towns to the hilltop “outposts” where she went to ancient wine cellars as well as new vineyards on the windswept hills. In Gilbert’s words: “For a number of reasons, the passage in the bible referring to the Israelites coming into the land and claiming their land has held important personal meaning for me.”
Ruthie Blum, the American born Israeli journalist and our mutual friend, has described Lela Gilbert thus: “Lela is what I call ‘one of us.’ She gets it about America, and she gets it about Israel. She is a rare breed who, upon her arrival in Israel, immediately grasped that the issues in both countries are very similar. It is not only that, as a pro-Israel Christian, she has a belief in the justice of the Jewish homeland. It’s more complicated than that. She actually understands the threat to democracy and free cultures that radical Islam poses. Aside from that, she managed to become socially enmeshed in Jerusalem society in a way that even many Jews who immigrate here have difficulty doing. She’s a real treasure.”
Gilbert writes that during her first days in Israel she visited a shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. The owner was curious about her as a writer and as a Christian who would come during the war in Lebanon. He gave her a gift–a silver Star of David–with the words: “It is my way of saying thank you for being with us.”
I can only add “Thank you Lela Gilbert, for this book.”
http://balfourpost.com/a-scandal-no-religious-freedom-on-jerusalems-temple-mount/
To the dismay of Israel’s religious community, Jews were once again banned from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount last Thursday (May 16). And, sadly, no one in Israel was the least bit surprised.
Because of the sanctity of the temple that reigned there centuries ago, the Temple Mount is the most sacred site in Judaism. Christians also hold great reverence for the area, thanks to myriad New Testament references relating to the life and ministry of Jesus in and around the temple.
Nonetheless, both Jews and Christians are frequently barred from visiting the Temple Mount Plaza. And both groups are always forbidden to read their scriptures, carry holy items, sing or pray there for fear of offending Muslim sensitivities.
On Wednesday, May 15, Jews celebrated Shavuot – one of three pilgrimage holidays on the religious calendar during which Jews historically traveled to the temple; they still gather from all around the world in Jerusalem.
This year, a visit was planned for a group of Jewish school children to mark the holiday at the Temple Mount. Muslim groups were incensed by the plan; they warned of violence if the children appeared.
Indeed, in recent weeks, there has been increasing anger in the Muslim world focusing on the Temple Mount’s Al-Aqsa Mosque: a flurry of rumors reported Jewish desecration of Al-Aqsa, including “storming” of the mosque, plotting to destroy it, or otherwise doing it harm. This is nothing new – such libels have long served as a trigger for protests, stone-throwing, rioting and, occasionally, massacres.
In recent years, Muslim groups have also reacted explosively to what they describe as the “Judaization” of the Temple Mount – as if Judaism having something to do with the Temple Mount were an late 20th Century innovation. In fact, several prominent Arab leaders have denied that a Jewish Temple ever existed there, introducing a real innovation – “Temple Denial” – to the discussion. The Muslim Brotherhood’s most prominent cleric, Yusuf Qaradawi, stated during a recent visit to Gaza, “Palestine was never Jewish…Palestine is Arab and Muslim and will remain Arab and Muslim, and Islam will prevail.”
Qaradawi isn’t alone in his convictions. Yasser Arafat, during the Camp David accords in 2000, denied that any Jewish Temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount. Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross described the incident in an interview with Brit Hume,
…at Camp David [in the summer of 2000] we did not put a comprehensive set of ideas on the table. We put ideas on the table that would have affected the borders and would have affected Jerusalem. Arafat could not accept any of that. In fact, during the 15 days there, he never himself raised a single idea. His negotiators did, to be fair to them, but he didn’t. The only new idea he raised at Camp David was that the Temple didn’t exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus… This is the core of the Jewish faith…he was denying the core of the Jewish faith there. [Emphasis added]
In 1996, the Muslim Waqf (custodians of the site) began a huge and highly controversial reconstruction project, digging out and enlarging the al-Marwani Mosque, which lies underground, beneath the al-Aqsa. As the digging progressed, by night the Waqf clandestinely removed 400 truckloads of artifact-rich earth and dumped it in landfills.
In the years that followed, those truckloads of earth were discovered, traced, reclaimed, and continue to be sifted through by Israeli archeologist Gabriel Barkay and a team of experts and volunteers. “At least it enables us to look at the soil,” Barkay explains, “although everything comes from a very disturbed context. But we know it comes from the Temple Mount. And we have tens of thousands of finds.”
One very significant find – one that refutes Temple Denial – is that of a bulla, a lump of clay bearing a seal impression, which is about 2,600 years old and dates from the First Temple Period. It bears the name of an official, Gadaliyahu son of Immer. The Immer family is recorded in the Bible, in the 20th chapter of the book of Jeremiah, verse 1.
Meanwhile, Jewish activists have increased their protests, growing increasingly belligerent about being forbidden to worship on the Temple Mount. And at last they have been heard.
On May 8, The Times of Israel reported, “the Knesset’s Interior Committee, headed by Likud MK Miri Regev, debated the long-standing unofficial ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount….At the meeting Elhanan Glatt, the director general of the Religious Affairs Ministry, said that his ministry was examining the possibility of revising the informal ban on Jewish prayer at the site.”
Unsurprisingly, these moves have exacerbated rumors, rage and resentment in the Muslim world. False tales about alleged Jewish assaults on Al-Aqsa appear nearly every day in the Arab media. Faced with further intimidation, will Israel’s lawmakers find the courage to change the rules?
In the eyes of many, forbiddance of non-Muslim prayer on the Temple Mount is a scandal. This is true not only for people of faith, but also for those who find what is termed an “informal” ban on Jewish and Christian prayer – a ban quite “formally” enforced by uniformed police officers – to be outrageous. Israel has always prided itself in carefully protecting the holy sites of Jews, Christians and Muslims.
How is it that the Jewish State has somehow allowed a Saudi Arabiaesque forbiddance of religious freedom on Judaism’s holiest site?
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Lela Gilbert is a journalist and author of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner (Encounter, 2012) and co-author of Persecuted: the Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson, 2013). She is an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and lives in Jerusalem
by Our Correspondent – 8th May 2013
Journalist Lela Gilbert
http://www.lapidomedia.com/node/2885
JERUSALEM’S warm air was fragrant with wood smoke and the sky alight with fireworks heralding dozens of weddings.
It was April 28 – Lag B’Omer – the only day in the Jewish calendar when weddings and other happy occasions can be celebrated during an otherwise somber stretch of days between Passover and Pentecost (or Shavuot in Hebrew, meaning Feast of Weeks marking the giving of the Law to Moses).
Apart from Orthodox Jewish circles, Lag B’Omer is one of the least known Jewish holidays. But it is a light-filled occasion, marked by festive celebrations, music and bonfires.
Traditional Jewish communities around the world revel in this festival in the midst of seasonal semi-mourning.
In one unique ritual, thousands have traditionally gathered in Tunisia to make their Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to Djerba, a resort island where many of Tunisia’s last remaining Jews live.
The origins of Lag B’Omer are obscure. It means ‘33rd day of the omer’ and has to do with Levitical sacrifice prescriptions (an omer being a measurement of barley), and later kabbalistic mysticism.
Even for secular Jews, it has become an occasion for joy. The town of Djerba hosts colourful processions and candle-lit festivities over three days.
Djerba’s synagogue is 2,500-years old, the oldest in Africa. Legend has it that Jews, fleeing the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, founded the synagogue in 586 BC.
But celebrations took place under heavy security again this year. In 2002 terrorists attacked the celebrations; Tunisia and the Lag B’Omer pilgrimage have never fully recovered.
Women in Djerba mark Lag B’Omer. Photo: Jewish Refugees
This year, in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ – which began with the self-immolation of a Tunisian vendor – Al-Arabiya reported, ‘More than a dozen army trucks were stationed at Ghriba [Djerba] itself, where an Al-Qaeda attack in 2002 killed 21 people, with police checkpoints set up around the nearby Jewish neighborhoods and on the road linking the airport to the tourist zone.’
In 2011, during the roiling Arab uprising, the pilgrimage was cancelled. In 2012 it resumed, but quietly. Thankfully, Tunisia’s Lag B’Omer 2013 observance passed off without violence.
Meanwhile, as Jews held their collective breath during the pilgrimage, Tunisia’s 24,000 Christians also watched events with concern: their community is also historically at risk.
Open Doors International’s World Watch lists Tunisia as thirtieth among the world’s 50 worst persecutors of Christians.
Muslim-background converts to Christianity are particularly endangered; they can face violence, rape and even murder. In what was once a moderately secular country, Salafist numbers swell and dangers to non-Muslims abound.
Islamists pose threats to both Jews and Christians as well as other minorities, and their actions often embody the jihadi motto, ‘First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People.’
Around 850,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim lands in the mid-twentieth century and few remain.
Today Christians in those same communities face intensifying violence and are fleeing. This pattern is evident throughout the Middle East – most notably Iraq, Egypt and Syria.
The newly released book, Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christiansfocuses on the dangers faced by Christians worldwide; reporting that much of today’s anti-Christian persecution is taking place in Muslim-majority states.
This has caught the attention of Jewish readers who often raise the question, ‘Why aren’t Christians doing more about this persecution?’
Jews have historically looked after their own far-flung communities during periods of intense oppression.
Persecution: Europe’s neo-Nazis remain a threat
And they’ve had a lot of experience thanks to 2,000 years of discrimination and mistreatment, in earlier days at the hands of the Church, and later pogroms and Soviet cruelties, the Holocaust, and now neo-Nazis and Islamist jihadis.
Cruel lessons have taught Jewish communities the importance of unity, solidarity and activism in the face of abuse.
Budapest
Meanwhile, as Tunisian Jews held their breath, Budapest in Hungary hosted the World Jewish Congress (WJC) annual meeting 5 – 7 May.
Neo-Nazi movements and anti-Semitism in Hungary prompted the WJC – one of innumerable Jewish advocacy groups around the world which usually meets in Jerusalem – to demonstrate its solidarity with Hungary’s vulnerable Jews. Angry protests decried the conference, but to no avail.
Western activists against anti-Christian persecution say they are hard-pressed to organize such unified endeavors.
They struggle to find funding, to fill chairs at events, or to gain the ear of congregations.
Rupert Shortt, Religion Editor at the Times Literary Supplement and author of Christianophobia (Rider, 2012) says: ‘It’s true. Christianity is by definition more quiescent, self-critical, more likely to reach out to the unreconciled other. It’s a worthy reflection of Christian teaching, but also both liberal guilt shading into liberal blind spot.’
Grassroots
Fifteen years ago, a small group of influential American and British Christian leaders formed a robust movement to defend religious freedom abroad – but it is struggling to keep up momentum even as worldwide violence increases.
Nina Shea, Director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, says their efforts ‘lit a prairie fire of grassroots activism’.
It resulted in some significant achievements: the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, which institutionalized regular reporting by the US State Department on religious persecution abroad; a US-brokered end to a genocidal religious conflict in South Sudan where some two million Christians and traditional African believers had already been killed; and South Sudan’s eventual independence from its persecutors in Khartoum.
‘Since then, these Christian leaders have passed away, retired or moved on to other interests and the movement has suffered.
‘Those non-church groups who remain engaged in defending against the mounting crisis of religious persecution internationally, such as ours, are under-funded and under-staffed.’
Shortt believes the sense that Christianity is a western religion and historically did the persecuting is partly to blame, together with a lack in the West of a sense of ethno-religious solidarity.
‘Whereas in fact Christians are persecuted more than any other faith community.
‘There is no community of Christians between Tunisia and Pakistan that is free from threat.’
Global anti-Christian persecution is a formidable challenge, threatening millions of lives on many fronts.
Christians can learn from the experience of world Jewry: to unite despite denominational differences, to inform themselves, seek solutions and speak with one clear voice on behalf of those who suffer.
Lela Gilbert is a journalist and author of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner (Encounter, 2012). She is an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and lives in Jerusalem and Southern California.
Persecuted: the Global Assault on Christians by Paul Marshall, Nina Shea and Lela Gilbert is published by Thomas Nelson and launched in March 2013. It is available from the usual online retailers.
FACTBOX
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945), the German Lutheran theologian who opposed Nazism and was incarcerated in 1943 and hanged for his faith wrote, in a sermon on 2 Corinthians 12:9:
‘Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak.
‘Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.
‘Christians should take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.’
The Cultural Intifada and Temple Denial – on The Glazov Gang
April 12, 2013 By Frontpagemag.com
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Lela Gilbert, author of Saturday People, Sunday People, actor Dwight Schultz (DwightSchultzFansite.tv) and Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.
The Gang members gathered to discuss The Cultural Intifada and Temple Denial. The dialogue occurred in Part I and focused on Islamists’ gambit to de-Judaize the Jewish state. The discussion was part of the Gang’s reflection on Lela Gilbert’s book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. Ms. Gilbert shared what brought her to Israel, the Israelis’ warm reception of her, and why, as Dr. Gabriel Barkay imparted to her, “Temple Denial is more dangerous and serious than Holocaust Denial.”
Part II dealt mostly with Saturday People, Sunday People, focusing on the dire lessons of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the trauma that Israeli citizens, including children, have suffered from Palestinian terror, Jimmy Carter’s Jew-Hate, and the world’s blind spot: the forgotten exodus of 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.
The segment ended on a reflection on Margaret Thatcher and the powerful way in which she shaped her era.
To watch both parts of the two-part series, see below:
Part I:
Part II:
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