The ‘Fecal’ Jihad on Churches

The Stream

Although the topic of this article is disgusting, that is not reason enough to be ignorant of it.

It is not enough for Muslims to continuously attack, vandalize, and set churches aflame throughout Western European regions that hold a sizeable Islamic presence. Another, rather sordid, tactic is apparently on the rise: Churches are now routinely being desecrated and smeared with human and animal excrement.

On April 3, a UK church that offers refugee support services was vandalized — including by being smeared with dog feces. Two weeks earlier, on March 15, two churches in Germany were defiled with excrement; in one of them, the feces was found near the altar.

A few days before that, vandals broke into and plundered a church in Italy, leaving human excrement on the floor. “The parish priest,” the report adds, “expressed his shock and disgust about this gesture of degradation and disrespect.” Also in Italy, two months earlier, excrement and urine were found mixed in the stoups (basins of holy water where worshippers dip their fingers before crossing themselves) at another church.

Similar examples stretch back decades. In 2019, an especially irreverent one occurred: Invaders used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nimes. In France, attacks on churches average two per day.

The identities of the poo-perpetrators are often never discovered. Sometimes they are intentionally concealed, as in this case from Spain, where surveillance cameras captured a “youth” defecating inside a church and smearing his waste on a statue of Christ; the video was made public only after the culprit’s face was blurred out.

All that said, it is telling that the vast majority of cases are occurring in precisely those Western nations that hold large Muslim populations, like Germany (here, here, here, here); France (here, here, here, here); Italy (here, here, here), and so on, and so forth.

Several churches, it’s worth noting, have been targeted on multiple occasions. Anrul Lourdu, the pastor of a German church that was for several months in a row smeared with dog feces. expressed his dismay:

We are speechless and meanwhile also powerless. It is simply undignified, unattractive and inhumane what is happening. We don’t know what to do any more.

In Italy, after feces were found smeared on the door handles of another church, Father Angelo Rivas expressed similar resignation:

It’s an escalation. First vandals urinating in the churchyard, eating and leaving dirt, only a week ago they soiled the door handles with dung, and now they have set the fire [to the church]. What should we do?

Rather than seeing justice done, catching the culprits can lead to more problems. Discussing how his cathedral in France was “daily” desecrated with feces and urine, one priest said, “Even when you catch them red-handed, they’re not afraid. It could almost become violent.”

It goes without saying that churches throughout the Muslim world have had similar experiences, further underscoring the identity of the fecal bandits plaguing European churches.

In one instance, after Muslims torched five churches in Kenya, they also “committed the heinous acts of scooping human feces onto the buildings.” In Tunisia, the most moderate Arab nation, fecal matter was smeared on the religious icons and walls of a church. During one Christmas Day in Indonesia, Muslim women and children threw plastic bags filled with dung and urine at Christians trying to celebrate their holy day. (Also in Indonesia — which is often presented as the world’s most “moderate” Muslim nation — a Muslim police officer violently smeared feces on a Christian man’s face, for supposedly “blaspheming” Muhammad.)

One even finds this sordid tactic at work throughout history. In 1147 in Portugal, Muslims displayed “with much derision the symbol of the cross,” wrote a chronicler. “They spat upon it and wiped the feces from their posteriors with it.” Decades earlier in Jerusalem, Muslims “spat on [crucifixes] and did not even refrain from urinating on them in the sight of all” (Sword and Scimitar, pp.171, 145).

Such, in short, is the grotesque hatred and contempt some members of the “religion of peace” have for churches and those who worship in them.