Newsweek
The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially
accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities
has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West
Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries
it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and
imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have
taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving
them from regions where their roots go back centuries.
The media’s
reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear
of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence
of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a
kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council
on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar
groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public
figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example
of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic
and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to
elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia."
"Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s
take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world.
Tolerance is for everyone—except the intolerant."
