Muslim Persecution of Christians Exposed to More Europeans

Note: On Nov. 23, 2021, Sonja Dahlmans, a columnist for a Belgian magazine, published an article summarizing my talk at Berlin.  Titled, “Lecture on Islamic Persecution in German Parliament,” and appearing on PAL NWS, a Dutch news website, a translation follows:

At the invitation of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, American Islam expert Raymond Ibrahim addressed the German parliament about the worldwide persecution of Christians. Ibrahim gave a lecture on the history and present of Islamic persecution of Christians. The lecture is dated December 2020, but was only recently released on its own page.

Ibrahim is American of Egyptian descent. His family, Coptic Christian refugees, emigrated to the United States where Ibrahim was born. He graduated in the history of Islam in the Middle East, especially military history. He now works as a writer and translator. Ibrahim masters several languages, including Arabic.

Since 2011, he started recording Christian persecution in the Islamic world on a monthly basis. Ibrahim indicated that he initially feared that he would not have enough incidents for a monthly column. Instead, he now has to select what to post or not, because there’s too much going on for him to report everything to his readers. He notes that the public in the West rarely hears or reads about Christian persecution. In contrast, he says, every incident in which Muslims are victims is widely reported in the press. According to Ibrahim, Christian persecution is deliberately brushed under the carpet.

There is an idea in the West that Islamic terrorism is new and also that persecution of Christians in Islamic countries is new. This is not true, according to Ibrahim. According to him, it is the basis of the history of Islam. According to Ibrahim, when Christian persecution is reported, it usually concerns ‘spectacular’ cases, such as the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya in 2015. However, he says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Eighty percent of the persecution of Christians would take place in an Islamic context, according to Ibrahim. “Governments ban churches, angry mobs burn churches and terrorists bomb churches, ” said Ibrahim. According to Sharia, a church cannot be restored or repaired. He predicts that such cases will also become more common in Europe. People persist in the idea that this is propaganda or Islamophobia and that the West itself is to blame for such atrocities because of the Crusades or colonization.

Ibrahim warns that with the disappearance of Christian culture and ethics in Europe we will see a resurgence of Islamic aggression. Last week it was announced that anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe have increased by 70 percent from 2019 to 2020.