Chowrangi

For centuries now Christian nations have been busy beating up one Muslim nation or another. In the Middle Ages they came as crusaders. Then they colonized many Muslim countries and tried to destroy their cultures and religion. During their struggle for independence some Muslims had to suffer terrible violence. The French killed about a million Muslims in Algeria because they wanted independence.The USA and Britain killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis without letting the world see the blood, thus practicing a lesson learned during the Vietnam war. Serbs have killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and raped thousands of women in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Israel has been for half a century destroying the Palestinian people with the help of arms and financial and moral support provided by the USA. In Lebanon when Christians were in the majority there was war, but now that the Muslims are in the majority there is peace except in the south of the country where Christians have been helping a foreign enemy against their own countrymen. When an American president needs to divert his people’s attention away from his sex scandal the easiest thing he finds is to bomb Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq — because he knows that this will be approved by a vast majority of his people. And then there is the media which is ever busy in maligning the Muslims while they do not at this point in time possess the resources to speak up: for every word spoken/written by a Muslim and heard/read by one person, a thousand words from a Christian are received by a thousand persons in the world. At the international level the voices of the Muslims are all but drowned by the Christian voices and those Christian voices are for the most part condemnatory. If a cartoonist was to depict the situation between the Western and Muslim civilizations, he or she will draw a weaker person not able or inclined to stand up or to speak while another stronger person is standing over him with a big stick, now and then beating him, and all the while shouting to him in a loud voice: you are a violent man.

It is important for both Muslims and Christians to ask: What will the Christian be if the tables were turned and their lands were first colonized by Muslims and then bombed or maligned or ethnically cleansed? If the past is any guide, the answer is clear: There will be a vicious reaction and given the chance an attempt at almost total destruction of the Muslims. For in Spain Muslims lived for about 850 years as rulers. They lived with Jews and Christians for the most part in a spirit of tolerance and cooperation in promoting science and culture to the point that their work prepared for the modern scientific revolution with all its benefits for mankind. But the moment Muslims became weaker, the hate in the Catholic heart came out with a vengeance. Muslims were either killed, converted, or forced to leave Spain and their heritage was as fully destroyed as was humanly possible. Before Palestine and Kosovo, there was Spain.

Above, I have mentioned only what the Christian nations have been doing or are doing to the Muslims. But when we look at what they have done to each other or to other people any validity in their claim of being people of love and peace vanishes. The horrible treatment of the heretics and witches in the Middle Ages probably inspired the tyrants of later centuries. The native peoples of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand bear a tragic witness to what Christian nations can do to other nations and with the blessings and assistance of Christian churches. In this century alone the Western nations have fought two world wars with tens of millions dead and untold misery for the living. For each victory in these two wars the church bells rang in the victorious countries. The first nation to make a weapon of mass destruction and the only one to use it is a Christian nation.

Had not the toll of death mounted too high for the Americans there can be little doubt that the fate of North Vietnam would have been like that of Iraq: it would have been bombed to submission no matter how many Vietnamese lives would have been lost. The lesson learned in North Vietnam was not that there should be no more war but that never again the American casualties would be allowed to mount so high and never again the cameras would be allowed to get so near the horrors of war that a backlash against the war would be created in the public. Often Christian countries have some hand even in the violent conflicts in non-Christian countries in Africa and Asia. The colonial policy of divide and rule sowed seeds of conflicts that later resulted in violence between the groups that the colonial powers turned against one another. Palestinian-Jewish conflict and the Kashmir issue are among the legacy of colonialism. After the colonial period interference by the Western countries continued in the internal affairs of African and Asian countries. Iran-Iraq war was encouraged by the West so that the Islamic revolution in Iran may not spread to the Arabian peninsula. The military government in Algeria which cancelled the elections that Muslims were poised to win had the support of France and this support is partly responsible for the violence there, which, it seems, is mostly done by the military.

In Rwanda the tribe that perpetuated a holocaust of another tribe follows the Catholic religion. The most cruel tyrant in history came from a Christian country and there has been no shortage of other somewhat less ruthless dictators in Christian countries, especially in South America and Africa.

Even in terrorism, associated in the media mostly with the Muslims, it is the Christians that hold the record when it comes to the number of children and other innocent people killed. The Oklahoma bombing, carried out by people professing to be Christians, claimed more completely innocent victims than any other single act of terrorism. Terrorism in Northern Ireland which was a direct result of a sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants and is often supported by the religious leaders, has probably killed more children and innocent people than Middle East terrorism. Moreover, Muslim terrorism is mostly linked to the sort of unjust treatment suffered by the Palestinians whereas the Oklahoma bombing and, to a lesser degree, Irish terrorism is difficult to link in such a way.

Now and then there appear religious sects whose beliefs lead them to violence. David Koreish armed his followers to teeth and led them to their violent death. There seem to exist several Millennium groups who are planning to engage in violence around the year 2000. Several doctors have been murdered by anti-abortionists and some Catholic leaders have not categorically condemned these killings. In some cases the violent impulses in Christian groups turn against the groups themselves. Jim Jones led hundreds of his followers to commit suicide.

Then there is racial violence, by no means dissociated from Christianity. Black churches have been burned in America and recently some Americans tied a black man with a rope and dragged him by their truck until he died. Such acts are often carried out by members of groups who also carry crosses. And in South Africa the inhuman system of apartheid was maintained by the church-going white community with the blessing of the churches and indeed the apartheid was practiced by the churches themselves.

At an individual level, too, most horrible examples of violence are seen in the Western Christian nations. In some American and British cities a car driver may take out his gun and shoot senselessly whoever happens to be passing by. There are many cases of church-going and Christmas-celebrating serial killers who are privately busy sexually attacking young men or women, killing them in the most horrible way, and then burying them in their backyards. Also, prior to the media focus on churches cases of gross sexual and other abuse of orphans by the Catholic priests were common. And there are even larger number of examples of church going parents who torture their children to death or destroy them mentally by incestuous relations.

Other posts by Mohammad Yusha

• Haunted - October 2nd, 2008
• Demons, Ghosts and Spirits - October 2nd, 2008
• Fajr Prayer - September 30th, 2008
• Power of the soul to destroy Black Magic - September 30th, 2008
• Wazeefas - September 29th, 2008
• How Sifli Amal is done and dangers associated with it - September 29th, 2008
• Magic using personal information - September 27th, 2008
• Spend on your wife and kids - September 17th, 2008
• Fathers with a dictatorial personality - September 17th, 2008
• The Custom of Joint Families - September 17th, 2008