The Magazine

Killing Christians

The underreported story of Islamist violence around the world.

Nov 11, 2002, Vol. 8, No. 09 • By AMITAI ETZIONI
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ON OCTOBER 17, bombs killed 6 people and wounded 143 in Zamboanga, the Philippines. While press accounts mentioned in passing that the victims were Christians, few conveyed to the reader that these were people assaulted by Muslim extremists because of their religion. On September 25, militant Muslims shot dead 7 Christian Pakistanis execution style in Karachi. Most of the media failed to report this at all, though it was at least the fifth bloody attack on Christians in Pakistan in the last twelve months.

And the media almost never point out that Christians are being killed, often at places of worship, in several countries with Islamic majorities or governments, not because they are Westerners or Americans (many are neither) but because they are Christians. Nor is the White House or Congress nearly as attentive--to put it mildly--to this pattern of killing as it is to any injury on either side of the conflict in Israel.

People who follow international news are aware that a civil war raged in Ethiopia for more than 30 years. But few realize that it was a religious war--between Muslim Eritrea and Christian Ethiopia--in which tens of thousands perished. Many know that the people of East Timor were savaged, but it is rarely mentioned that most East Timorese are Christian, while the Indonesian militants who killed many of them and brutalized the refugees in West Timor are Muslim. Indeed, Christians in other parts of Indonesia have hardly fared better; for instance, thousands died during riots in the Moluccan Islands in 2000.

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