R e p o r t

Muslim Extremists Kill Jews and Christians in the Month of Ramadan Salman Rushdie and Pulitzer-Prize-Winner Friedman: Where is the Outcry of Decent Muslims?

by Wolfgang Polzer

In the holy month of Ramadan Muslim extremists have drawn a track of blood across Africa and the Middle East. Their targets: Christians and Jews. On November 28, terrorists presumably linked with El Kaida killed 16 people, among them three Israelis, in a suicide bomb attack on an Israeli hotel in Mombasa, Kenya. At the same time they tried to shoot down a jetliner bound for Tel Aviv with 270 people on board.

One week earlier more than 200 people, most of them Christians, lost their lives in violent clashes with Muslims in Northern Nigeria. Shouting “Allah is great” an outraged mob destroyed 20 churches and eight mosques. Their anger was directed against a beauty pageant and the fashion journalist Isioma Daniel. She alleged that Muhammed, the founder of Islam, would have taken a beauty queen for his wife. Muslims took this as an insult to Islam and issued a Fatwah – an order to murder Ms. Daniel. She went underground in the United States.

At the same time in the Lebanese port of Sidon an assassin shot and killed the 31-year-old American missionary nurse Bonnie Witherall. She had ministered mainly to pregnant Palestinian women. The Christian clinic had received threats from Muslim extremists over the last three months.

All this happened during Ramadan, when Muslims are obliged to fast, pray and practice charity. With good reason evangelicals have always regarded this time as a special challenge and started a prayer movement. Main line churches, however, have been surprisingly cautious to react to these atrocities. In greetings to the Muslim community on the end of Ramadan, the leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany, for instance, urged Muslims and Christians to keep the peace. Neither could endorse religious intolerance and violence, Protestant leader Manfred Kock wrote. And the chairman of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, added: “Violence is a pest to be resisted by all believers.”

Writers and journalists in the United States were even more outspoken. Salman Rushdie – himself subject to a Fatwah from 1989 – 1998 because of his “Satanic Verses” – asked: “Where, after all is the Muslim outrage at these events? As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of life, art and philosophical refection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?”

Three times Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman urged “the decent but passive Muslim center” to “go to war against this harsh fundamentalism”. Writing in the New York Times he recalled that Imam Samudra, the Indonesian Islamist accused of masterminding last month’s Bali attack, reportedly said that a “holy bomb” ripped that disco apart. Friedman: “There is nothing holy about a bomb that kills 200 people just because they are foreigners.”

A Palestinian security official in Lebanon claimed that the killing of Bonnie Witherall was a hostile Muslim reaction “to the preaching lessons the center was giving to Muslim youths.” Friedman: “I have no idea whether this woman’s clinic was involved in proselytizing Muslims, but I do know that she was a nurse caring for Muslims, and she was shot for what she was.” By the way, Gary Witherall has forgiven the murderer of his wife. “It’s a costly forgiveness,” he said, “it cost my wife.”

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Evangelical news agency idea. Wolfgang Polzer Tel: +49-6441-915102, Fax: +49-6441-915118 e-mail: – Internet: http://www.idea.de Postal address: idea, PO Box 1820, 35528 Wetzlar, Germany

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