Do Christians Bleed?: Unreported persecution in the Muslim world.

An Indonesian man with a lined, anxious face hands me a photograph from a magazine report on events in his homeland. I am looking at a photograph of the burned and decapitated corpse of a Christian man who was murdered in a Christmas Eve pogrom in his village. His killers were members of Laskar Jihad, a heavily armed Islamist terror group. "They cut off his genitals too," the Indonesian man explains. "He died at his church."

My informant, a Christian human-rights activist who refused to be identified, in order to protect his family, has photographs of Christian villages burned to the ground by Laskar Jihad. Numerous sources say the group has killed as many as 10,000 Indonesian Christians, forcibly converted thousands more, and demolished hundreds of churches. Activists say the Jakarta regime has only sporadically shown an interest in protecting the nation's Christian minority, and some accuse elements of the government and military of sympathy with the jihadists.

"I was in Indonesia when 9/11 happened, and I followed the statements of Muslim political leaders," says my informant. "They were encouraging Muslims to help Osama bin Laden. I was crying in my heart for New York, but I'm telling you, 9/11 happened once in New York, but it's happening every day to Christian villages in Indonesia."

Ann Buwalda, head of the Washington-based Jubilee Campaign USA, an international human-rights organization, says that between 50,000 and 60,000 Christians are now concentrated in the Tentena region, disarmed and surrounded by Laskar Jihad encampments. The besieged Christian community spent August awaiting a jihad assault rumored to be coming any day. Says Buwalda, "In the event that the government continues to do nothing against Laskar Jihad, these Christians will be slaughtered."

Indonesian Christians are not alone in suffering under this barbarism. Minority Christian populations throughout the Islamic world endure persecution in varying degrees. From southeast Asia through Arab lands and into northern Africa, Christians and believers in other minority religions live with degradation, discrimination, and worse.

By consensus, Sudan continues to be the worst of a bad lot. The Arab Islamic government in the north continues its genocidal war upon the black Christians and animists in the south. Freedom House, the venerable human-rights organization, estimates that in the past 17 years, two million Christians and animists have been slaughtered by the Islamist regime, with over twice that number turned into refugees. Churches continue to be bombed, women and children raped, and non- Muslims kidnapped and forced into slavery.

Nigeria has been in the news lately because an Islamic court in the country's north sentenced to death by stoning a woman who gave birth out of wedlock; she will be executed when she weans her baby, the jurists decided. Pakistan, which has been home to a small Christian population for almost as long as there have been Christians, has been the site of grisly anti-Christian pogroms. In Saudi Arabia, foreigners are deported for practicing Christianity, and Saudi Christians, if caught, are beheaded.

Even Egypt treats its Coptic Christian minority as second-class citizens, and is rather less than vigilant about protecting them from attack by Islamic extremists. The Copts dare not complain, figuring they're better off living under the regime of president-for-life Hosni Mubarak than under the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. It's a humiliating choice, but it guarantees their survival, for now.

Paul Marshall, senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, says violent Islamic persecution of Christians is a relatively recent phenomenon. He blames it on the rise of extremist Islam of the sort bankrolled by the Saudis, which gained a foothold in many of these countries as European colonizers withdrew. "Another factor is that the previous secular gods -- socialism and Arab nationalism -- have failed," says Marshall, author of the forthcoming Islam at the Crossroads. "If you don't like the spread of Western cultural commodities around the world, where do you turn? To Islam. The movement we're looking at is the move for the restoration of a radical Islamic caliphate."

But Bat Ye'or, the preeminent scholar of dhimmitude -- the condition of second-class status with which Jews and Christians have historically had to live under Islamic rule -- insists that persecution is the normal state of relations between the dhimmis and their Muslim rulers. In effect, European conquerors suspended history in those lands when they abolished Islamic shari'a law and the dhimmitude it mandated, and imposed Western concepts of equality under the law. "Dhimmitude was a dehumanizing system, bordering on slavery," Ye'or says. "After decolonization, dhimmitude for Christians and other non-Muslims is coming back with the return of shari'a rule. It is a repetition of the past, because it follows the traditional pattern of Islamic history and jurisdiction."

In her new book, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, Ye'or details how European governments have a history of selling out Christian and Jewish populations in the Muslim world in order to curry favor with Islamic regimes. Says Ye'or, "Their priority was a policy of appeasement with the Muslim world, for political and economic interests. They abandoned the Christians, hoping they would integrate in Muslim majorities."

This continues even today. To cite but one example from Ye'or's book, in 1999, U.N. delegations from France, Italy, and Spain refused to stand in the way of an alliance of Islamic states seeking to remove the non-governmental-organization status of Christian Solidarity International, a relief group devoted to helping the enslaved Christians of Sudan. CSI's John Eibner, who has personally undertaken a number of death-defying missions to Sudan to rescue slaves, blamed Europe's desperation to appease Muslim governments. Says a frustrated Ann Buwalda, "I was in Brussels in April, trying to wake up the European Parliament to the fact that 10,000 Christians have been killed in Maluku [Indonesia], but all they wanted to talk about was the Jenin refugee camp, where Israel was supposed to have massacred all these Palestinians -- it was a lie anyway. I think because this situation involves Christians, it's not popular."

Indeed, Freedom House's Marshall has a list of recent examples of Western media coverage in which massacres and torture of Christians at the hands of Muslims are downplayed, if reported at all. Says Marshall, "There's still an image among many in the media of Christians as white male Westerners. It doesn't compute that Christians would be victims."

This is not a new story, but it has taken on a new salience since September 11 brought jihad to America in spectacular fashion. Marshall says the war on terror can help those Christians remaining under the Muslim yoke if the U.S. and its allies decisively defeat Islamic extremism and encourage moderate Muslims to take power. While Ye'or disputes the degree to which moderate Islam -- meaning an Islam that doesn't seek to subjugate non-Muslims -- can be said to exist, she agrees with Marshall's view that there do exist tolerant Muslims who won't speak publicly against jihad out of real fear of losing their lives. "Under a regime of terror and a culture of hate, people are afraid for themselves, their children, and their beloved," she says. "The situation exists in Europe as well. People do not feel safe and are afraid to speak. It is the free world which must speak up, but the free world remains mute."

Meanwhile, people like Buwalda have the unenviable task of traveling to these countries to bear witness to the martyrdom, which so many Christians in America and Europe prefer not to see.

"You try going over there and facing these Christians, like I did recently in Indonesia, and answering them when they ask, 'You're supposed to be our brother Christians, why aren't you doing anything? Why are you letting them kill us?'" says Buwalda. "You can see how angry and upset they are, and they're right to be. They say they just hope September 11 wakes us up to what they have to live with every day."