A Deadly Beginning To The New Year

It's 2011 today but the beginning of a new year hasn't instilled a new attitude in radical Muslims. Their thirst for jihad remains as fierce as ever, with Egyptian Christians being the first "infidels" of the new year to feel their wrath.

Just minutes after midnight on January 1st, a bomb exploded as Coptic Christians exited the Qidiseen or Saints Church in Alexandria, Egypt after attending a New Year's Mass. Twenty-one people were killed and nearly 100 were injured.

Coptic Christians, who make up 10% of Egypt's population and face increasing persecution, didn't take this attack lying down. Riots broke out almost immediately after the bombing, with Copts targeting Muslims passersby and a mosque across the street from the church. Police responded with rubber bullets and other methods to disperse the understandably angry crowds. Calm eventually returned to Alexandria's streets, but tensions between Muslims and Copts remained high.

The Egytian Interior Ministry claimed that "foreign elements", and not Egytian citizens, were responsible for the church bombing. Alexandria's governor, Adel Labib, blamed the bombing on Al Qaeda in Iraq, citing the threats the terror organization made against Egytian Christians in November. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) promised attacks on the Egytian Church because it believes the Church is imprisoning two Christian women who converted to Islam in order to get divorces from their husbands (the Coptic Church forbids almost all divorces). Both AQI and hard-line Egytian Muslims accuse the Coptic Church of trying to force the two women to renounce Islam. The Church denies holding the women against their will.

This brutal attack on innocent Egyptian Christians could just as easily have happened in the West against American or European Christians. It serves as a bloody reminder that jihad is still on and that radical Muslims are commited to fighting "infidels" wherever we are. Their war on us is a religious duty commanded by their "prophet" in their "holy" book. And the aim of their war is to convert, subjugate, or kill us.

We must be courageous and resolute in fighting this evil and tenacious foe, and we must have no goal but victory. Without victory we in the West will find ourselves degraded to the same miserable, second-class status as the Copts in Egypt. Don't think that can happen? Remember, the Christians were once the majority in Egypt. No, sadly, the Muslims are. We must not let that happen in the West or that will be the end of Christian civilization. I, for one, believe that Christian civilization is worth defending whether in the West, in Egypt, or the Middle East. So I shout with the Coptic faithful who filled the streets of Alexandria after Saturday's attack, "With our blood and soul, we redeem the cross!" Amen.

Only In The Kingdom

I first heard of this last year and thought it was a fluke, but now it's happened again. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has banned the celebration of Valentine's Day. Yes, you read that right. A holiday dedicated to honoring and celebrating love, especially romantic love, is verboten in the Kingdom. And to make sure every Saudi got the point, the Kingdom's police confiscated every item, every product, in the nation's stores that was connected in any way to the heinous holiday. Still, many love struck Saudis risked the wrath of the religious police to buy tokens of love for their significant others. Red roses, now contraband, were selling at very high prices for days before today.

Can you imagine? Roses as contraband?! Forget drugs! Forget porno movies! It's those damn roses that are destroying the Kingdom's morals!

What accounts for this absurd policy in the Kingdom? Well, last year the explanation was that Valentine's Day was a Western holiday and its celebration in Saudi Arabia was an unacceptable encroachment of Western Christian culture into the birthplace of Islam. I didn't believe that last year and I don't believe it now. I think the real problem with Valentine's Day is that Saudi officialdom's fanatical brand of Islam is just antithetical to love. Don't think so? Then consider this.

If Saudi Islam is opposed to Western cultural celebrations of love, but not to love itself, then why ban Valentine's Day? Why not just Islamize it? Why not call February 14 Aisha's Day, after Mohammed's favorite wife? On that day Saudi men could buy gifts rooted in Islamic culture and faith and give them to their wives to show they loved them as much as Mohammed was said to love Aisha. The Kingdom could even use Aisha's Day to counter the "stereotype" that Islam, especially its brand of Islam, is a misogynist faith. And changing Valentine's Day to Aisha's Day wouldn't be totally unprecedented. In the past Islam had no problem turning Christian churches into mosques, so changing a Christian holiday into an Islamic one shouldn't be hard or distasteful. This would be the best solution to the Valentine's Day "problem"...if the Kingdom's faith believed in love. It doesn't.

Saudi Arabia is ruled by the fanatically puritanical and fundamentalist version of Islam called Wahhabism. This faith can't stomach a celebration of love, whatever its origin, because it can't stomach love itself. For Saudi officialdom, love is the real problem, not Valentine's Day.

Only in the Kingdom, and I don't mean the magic one.

Honor Killing I Can Believe In

This may come as a surprise, but I kind of like the idea of honor killing. No, not the sick kind of "honor" killing done by Muslims, but a truly honorable form of honor killing. Let me explain.

In the Islamic world there's this weird obsession with family "honor", epitomized by the chastity of the family's women. A family is only as honorable as it's women are virginal. Any breach of female purity brings egregious disgrace on the family, disgrace that can be alleviated only by the death of the sullied woman. And it doesn't matter how the female became impure, nor does her age make any difference in applying the "remedy". A victim of rape or incest is just as much a cause of disgrace as a purposely promiscuous woman. A child can be just as much a cause of disgrace as an adult female. In Iran a man living in a podunk village beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he suspected his brother of molesting her. He killed his daughter, not her alleged attacker. This is barbaric, and isn't the kind of honor killing I believe in.

When I hear the phrase "honor killing", I ask myself this question: what's more dishonorable, to have a rape victim in the family or a rapist in the family? Those of us in the West know the right answer to that question; Muslims don't. We Westerners know that the real disgrace is being the relative of a man who brutalizes women and/or children. The real disgrace is seeing all of your child training effort end in the creation of a predator. Honor killing should be about expunging the shame of the rapist's family. If a rapist's father or brother kills him as the ultimate way to say, "We're sorry", and in order to remove the family's shame, that's honor killing I can believe in.

That father in Iran should've beheaded his brother, not his daughter. A child or woman who's been attacked by a larger and stronger male isn't the cause of anyone's shame. The Iranian father murdered his baby girl because of Islam's perverted vision of morality and justice. And to think some PC whipped Westerners want to facilitate the spread of that perverted vision into the West. Perhaps they should be beheaded. That, too, would be honor killing I can believe in.