Sri Lanka orders 161 foreign Islamic clerics out

Sri Lanka has ordered a group of 161 foreign Islamic clerics to leave the country, for flouting visa regulations by preaching to pockets of Muslims around the country, an official said Sunday.

Controller of Immigration and Emigration Chulananda Perera said the clerics, who were mostly Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Maldivian and Arab, had travelled into the country on tourist visas.

"We have ordered them to leave the country by January 31. They have violated immigration laws. A tourist visa is to have a holiday or visit friends and family and not to preach Islam," Perera told AFP. 

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Al Jazeera's Jihad

A few months back I joined forces with Cliff Kincaid of AIM, along with human rights activists and advocates for journalistic integrity, to protest the expansion of Al-Jazeera, terror TV, in the United States. I wrote about it here at The Daily Caller.

Turning over our airwaves to jihadist propaganda outfits is not diplomacy; it is surrender. The war in the information battle-space is now the most critical war, and we are disarming America.

The ruse of using freedom of speech to allow propaganda broadcasts over our airways is the strategy of stealth jihadists. They invoke our freedoms to inevitably kill our freedoms. The issue of the expansion of Al Jazeera into the United States can only be likened to an expansion of Goebbels’s media network into the U.S. at the height of World War II. 

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Nigeria’s Islamists grow more deadly

COORDINATED attacks claimed by a radical Islamist sect have killed at least 200 people in north Nigeria’s largest city, hospital records show, as gunfire still echoes around some areas of the sprawling city…

Boko Haram, whose name means ‘’Western education is sacrilege’’ in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an AP count.

So far this year, the group has been blamed for at least 196 killings, according to an AP count.

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Jihad in Nigeria

Utterly appalling violence by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria where the latest tally after the latest attacks on Christian villages and churches. The media have described these events as ‘riots’; we would call this a jihadi pogrom. It is but the latest episode in what the media persist in characterising as inter-ethnic violence, but which is in fact a systematic attempt by Muslims to murder and ethnically cleanse the Christian community. The onslaught is falsely described as ‘retaliation ‘ for imagined previous violent attacks. But these attacks on churches and Christians have been going on for years. The Christians haven't yet retaliated.

The fact that the jihad in Africa is widely ignored in the west is not just a moral dereliction of duty. It is a refusal by the west to understand what it is actually up against. What is happening to Nigeria’s Christians makes a mockery of the frenzied western obsession with Israel. To understand the real cause of global tumult we should look carefully at Africa, and the appalling suffering of those upholding the religion that underpins the western world.

We can look how the animistic tribes of Central Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Mauritania and Nigeria fell prey to the Jihadis. And how their struggle continues even today in the conflicts of the Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Somalia and between the Arabized Northern Sudanese with the Christian Dinka tribesmen of Southern Sudan and the Muslim but non-Arabized, darker-skinned tribesmen of Darfur who were forcibly converted to Islam late in the 18th century Areadi Gaya, the non-Muslim ruler of Futa Bandu State in West Sudan was forced to embrace Islam after he was defeated by the Mamelukes of Egypt.

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Nigeria struggles to curb Islamists After Attacks kill 256

Attacks by Islamic militants in Nigeria that killed at least 256 people in the northern city of Kano are challenging President Goodluck Jonathan’s government a week after a nationwide strike paralyzed the economy.

The militant Muslim group Boko Haram, which is fighting for rule by Islamic law in the north, said it was responsible for blasts at eight government buildings in Kano on Jan. 20. The death toll was confirmed today by Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress, whose members helped carry the dead and wounded to hospitals.


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Somali convert from Islam whipped in public

 

A Somali convert from Islam was paraded before a cheering crowd last month and publicly flogged as a punishment for embracing a “foreign religion,” sources said.

Sofia Osman, a 28-year-old Christian from Janale city in Somali’as Lower Shabelle region, had been taken into custody by Islamic extremist al Shabaab militants in November; the public whipping was meant to mark her release. She received 40 lashes on Dec. 22 while jeered by spectators.

“Osman was whipped 40 lashes at 3 p.m., but she didn’t tell what other humiliations she had suffered while in the hands of the militants,” an eyewitness, told Compass, adding that whipping left her bleeding. “I saw her faint. I thought she had died, but soon she regained consciousness and her family took her away.”

The whipping was administered in front of hundreds of spectators after Osman was released from her month-long custody in al Shabaab camps. Nursing her injuries at her family’s home, in the days after the punishment she would not talk to anyone and looked dazed, a source close in touch with the family said. She has since been relocated. 

 

How can we remain silent while Christians are being persecuted?

Father Immanuel Dabaghian, one of Baghdad’s last surviving priests, is expecting a quiet Christmas. To join him in the Church of the Virgin Mary means two hours of security checks and a body search at the door, and even then there’s no guarantee of survival. Islamist gunmen massacred 58 people in a nearby church last year, and fresh graffiti warns remaining worshippers that they could be next.
The Americans have gone now, and Iraq’s Christian communities – some of the world’s oldest – are undergoing an exodus on a biblical scale.

Of the country’s 1.4 million Christians, about two thirds have now fled. Although the British Government is reluctant to recognise it, a new evil is sweeping the Middle East: religious cleansing. The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Tunisia, priests are being murdered. Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest.

Salafists, who are emerging as victors of the Arab Spring. They belong to the same mutant strain of Sunni Islam which inspired al-Qaeda. Their agenda is sectarian warfare, and they loathe Shia Islam as much as they do Christians and Jews. Their enemy lies not over a border, but in a church, synagogue or Shia mosque. The Salafists may be detested by the Muslim mainstream. But as they are finding out, you don’t need to be popular to seize power in a post-dictatorship Arab world – you just need to be the best organised. The West is so obsessed with government structure that it doesn’t notice when power lies elsewhere, and Islamist death squads are executing barbers and unveiled women in places like Basra.

Two years ago, the idea of such bloody sectarianism would have sounded like a macabre fantasy in a country as civilised as Egypt. After al-Qaeda bombed a church on New Year’s Day, Muslim elders sat in the front pews forming a human shield and defying the terrorists. But moderate Egyptians are now losing this power struggle. The killing has started, with another 25 Copts murdered in October. Tens of thousands of Egypt’s Christians have already joined their Iraqi counterparts in exile: as Iraq proved, one death can lead to a thousand emigrations. The Salafists are finding it staggeringly easy to realise their fantasy of a “purer” Egypt.

The Arab Spring was always going to mean danger for religious minorities, unleashing the Islamic extremists who previously were kept at bay. For all their evil, the old secular tyrants abused their victims equally, whether they wore the cross, hijab or skullcap. This year’s revolutions are marked by the utter absence of any leaders-in-waiting. History has repeatedly shown how, under such circumstances, regime change can be followed by a descent into sectarian chaos. Extremists can easily start fights along religious or ethnic lines by assassinating a leader, or blowing up a shrine. The result can be civil war (as with Bosnia and Rwanda), even leading to partition (as with India and Cyprus).

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