Monthly Archives: May 2014

MTV Indoctrinates Viewers at Behest of CAIR

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In 1979, the United State severed ties with Iran. An interesting twist however, Iran did not sever ties with factions inside the United States and pro-Khomeini Shiite activities. Even back in 1979 and moving forward, Iranian influence and Islamic influence were making end roads into the culture and driving down Main Street USA. No one noticed except the FBI. But the investigations of the FBI remained classified until 2008 and then the reports were meant to remain obscure and out of sight from America.

Moving into the United States went unnoticed such that Islam is now a common and accepted condition in America but this is the time to fight back as Islam is political and packaged as a religion. Sharia law cannot compete with the U.S. Constitution however, so far it has.

So, here we are witnessing Islamic indoctrination on our televisions right in our homes but who notices that? CAIR is a co-conspirator of the Holyland Foundation trial and was deemed such by the Department of Justice. Why then would MTV partner with CAIR?

No one at MTV is talking which likely is to understand that no one at MTV did their homework or bothered with vetting. So, the homework has been done for them and perhaps you will collectively contact MTV and hold class with their leadership. Then have a talk with your family and then have a talk with your cable provider until MTV admits the error and fixes the matter.

 

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MTV Partners With CAIR Despite Islamist Agenda

MTV has seriously erred by choosing CAIR, an organization with an extremist history that tars every opponent as an anti-Muslim bigot.
By Ryan Mauro

MTV is including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity with a history of radicalism, in its “world-class coalition of expert partners” for a campaign to combat discrimination and inequality. CAIR has a history of tarring its opponents by calling them “anti-Muslim” or “Islamophobes.”

 

The multi-year “Look Different” campaign will use celebrity activism, television shows and social media to influence the over 500 million households that MTV is available in. While well-intentioned, MTV unfortunately chose to include CAIR, an organization with an extremist history that tars every opponent as an anti-Muslim bigot.

The Justice Department designated CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history. The government listed CAIR as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, specifically its secret Palestine Committee; a body set up to covertly support the Hamas terrorist group.

The designation was upheld by a federal judge in 2009 because of “ample” evidence to show that CAIR is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s pro-Hamas network in America. After the designation, the FBI formally ended its use of CAIR as an outreach partner “until we can resolve whether there continues to be a relationship between CAIR or its executives with Hamas.”

In 2004, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in an interview with Al-Jazeera that CAIR does not consider Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations. He said, “We do not and will not condemn any liberation movement inside Palestine or Lebanon.”

In 2007, federal prosecutors said in a court filing: “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists … the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”

You can read the Clarion Project’s fully-documented profile of CAIR here.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have a history of extremism and anti-Semitism; the exact type of sentiment that MTV’s project seeks to counter. Yet, MTV is embracing an organization with confirmed links to these groups. CAIR’s fundraising banquets regularly feature radical speakers that promote violence and anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda and conspiracy theories.

“In our work, we see biases carried out in hurtful actions almost every day. The fact that so many of the young people MTV polled want to work to change or eliminate harmful biases fills us with hope that campaigns like Look Different can effect long-lasting, positive changes in our society,” CAIR spokesman Amina Rubin said.

CAIR and associated Islamists play the “Islamophobia

IslamophobiaGlossary Item

Unwarranted fear of Muslims; term frequently used by Islamist groups and their allies to label critics of Islamic extremism as bigots in order to stifle criticism.

According to Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood front group (IIIT), “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.”

” card on anyone who stands in their way, drawing the ire of anti-Islamist Muslim activists. It is part of a calculated political strategy and CAIR will utilize MTV towards this end if given the opportunity. 

“Name-calling with the term Islamophobia is an aggressive tactic popularized by apologists for Radical Islam to silence individuals who attempt to tell the truth about Jihadist Islam,” writes Muslim activist Tawfik Hamid, a former member of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group in Egypt.

Raheel Raza, President of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, describes the “Islamophobia” tactic as “a form of emotional extortion intended to extract special concessions from well-meaning but gullible people the West.”

A former member of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, has talked about a private meeting he held in the 1990s with the International Institute of Islamic Thought, CAIR’s fellow U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. The discussion focused on delegitimizing any opposition by accusing it of “Islamophobia.”

“This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics,” he explains.

This tactic is even used on devout Muslims. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim, has been accused of belonging to an “Islamophobia Network” countless times by CAIR. The group also went after the American Islamic Congress without provocation, accusing it of promoting “Islamophobia” just because it hasn’t adopted CAIR’s political causes.

This stands in sharp contrast to CAIR’s treatment of Islamist radicals, most recently defending Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a virulently anti-Semitic group with a terrorist history.

The American Islamists have been using this strategy since long before 9/11. For example, Imam

ImamGlossary Item

Religious authority figure; usually the leader of a mosque.

Siraj Wahhaj, a radical cleric that helps CAIR fundraise, can be seen preaching this theme in this video from around the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

Wahhaj tells the audience that there’s an anti-Muslim conspiracy involving the U.S. government and Israel and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he claims, is part of it. The overall message is the same one that we hear today: The Islamists’ opponents are part of an anti-Muslim network that is hijacking the institutions of power.

CAIR’s efforts to use MTV’s campaign for political advantage will be endorsed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, another organization included in MTV’s coalition. The think-tank equates any recognition of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood with anti-Muslim bigotry.

“The sole evidence for this conspiracy theory is a 20-year old document outlining a plan for such a [Muslim Brotherhood] takeover, which has since been debunked as the fantasy of a single Muslim Brotherhood member,” the Center incorrectly claims.

The Muslim Brotherhood document the Center refers to introduced as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Contrary to what the Center says, the file’s authenticity has not been debunked or even seriously challenged.

And even if it was, it wouldn’t make any difference. Supporting proof comes in the form of declassified FBI documents, court filings, U.S. government determinations, other internal Brotherhood documents and the Islamists’ own actions and statements.

On May 19, the Clarion Project contacted MTV to inform the network of CAIR’s history and its false labeling of any and all critics as anti-Muslim “Islamophobes” with bigoted agendas. We requested a statement in response. MTV did not respond.

MTV has seriously erred by choosing CAIR as an “expert partner” in combating intolerance and discrimination. The well-meaning campaign runs the risk of becoming a platform for CAIR to assault the integrity of its opponents.

War Time President or Ally? Not so Much

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Much has been written that Barack Obama is feeble when it comes to foreign policy. There is the matter of Syria where deference was given to Putin by the White House to handle matters regarding the civil war there as well as the chemical weapons. Well, now additional chemical weapons are being used today that are chlorine based barrel bombs. Then there is Iraq where war again is as bad today as it was in 2004.

One cannot overlook the matter of the Budapest Memorandum where the United States as well as the United Kingdom must protect Ukraine with something more than a VP Joe Biden visit and MRE’s.

Completely ignored until 300 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Harem, it was not until the media reported the vast kidnappings that we found that neither Hillary Clinton or John Kerry listed Boko Harem on the FTO (Foreign Terror Organization) list. Heck it was not until this past January of 2014 that the attackers in Benghazi, Ansar al Sharia was listed on the FTO.

There is a war brewing in the South China sea where China continues to be aggressive over disputed islands involving Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

So, sanctions rule and go where no offensive measures shall. Diplomatic victories should prevail for sure but to date, all diplomatic efforts and talks have failed with Iran nuclear negotiations are now permanently broken as is the matter between Israel and the Palestinians.

The truth be known, America is at war and Barack Obama has not figured out how to be a war time president except to retreat without tangible victories anywhere.

Allies are asking hard questions of the White House and not getting any responses, so their conclusions are such that they doubt seriously that America even with NATO’s Article 5 will not be at their side at all.

 

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May 27, 2014

U.S. Foreign Policy Barack Obama Is Accused Of Timidity Overseas, Raising Fear and Anger Among The Country’s Allies.

By Geoff Dyer

When President Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012, he pulled off what for Democrats was a remarkable feat – he took foreign policy off the table as a campaign issue.  Ever since Harry Truman was accused of “losing China”, Republicans have sought to cast their Democratic opponents as weak in the face of foreign challenges. Yet fresh from his risky but successful military operation to kill Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama side-stepped the usual assault during his re-election campaign. His challenger Mitt Romney hardly brought up foreign policy.  Eighteen months later, the political ground is shifting rapidly beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. As he prepares to give an important address on foreign policy at West Point tomorrow, the president finds himself under attack over what critics charge is a record of indecisive leadership.  The loudest voices have been Mr. Obama’s political opponents at home, but the critique of a rudderless, risk-adverse president has also found strong echoes among some of America’s most important allies. From Saudi Arabia to Japan, officials have been wondering whether the US would still come to their defense.  Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 reflected a widespread belief at home and abroad that there was “too much America” in the world. Although he still seems to be in tune with the US public, Mr. Obama faces the accusation that there is now too little.  Even John Kerry, his secretary of state, appeared to acknowledge this international perception in a speech last week. “We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism,” he told students at Yale. “Most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence – they worry about what would happen in our absence.”

In his West Point speech, Mr. Obama will lay out how the US intends to “lead the international community but without getting overextended”, as a White House official puts it. But the persistent attacks have left Mr. Obama in a defensive crouch, tetchily defending his cautious approach.  “That may not always be sexy. That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows,” he said during a recent Asia trip. “But it avoids errors.”  The rap sheet on Mr. Obama has two basic charges: that he is too timid in his approach to foreign affairs; and that the US has begun a process of retreating from its place in the world during his presidency.  “On all these issues, our response has been to do the minimum and no more,” says Bob Corker, the leading Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee. “Every allied government I talk to, I get the same questions about whether we will be there.”  On one level, the claim that Mr. Obama is too passive is part of a longstanding intellectual debate in Washington about foreign policy.

When he was first elected, many analysts pegged Mr. Obama as an idealist – a reflection of his stirring rhetoric, his reaching out to the Muslim world and his longstanding association with Samantha Power, now his UN ambassador and the leading intellectual voice of liberal interventionism.  Instead, in recent years Mr. Obama has revealed himself as a president more rooted in a realist tradition that is more focused on the defense of national interests and is wary of moral causes. This should not have come as a complete surprise: even during his first election campaign, he told interviewers of his respect for the foreign policy of George HW Bush. Mr. Obama’s reticence over Syria reflects a belief that it is better to avoid mistakes than to appear decisive.  “The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to the UN last September.  “Obama’s mistake on Syria was not that he did not follow through on the red line he set [about the use of chemical weapons],” says John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago scholar who is one of the leading realist thinkers. “It was setting a red line in the first place.” (He adds that he believes Mr. Obama “95 per cent supports” his point of view.)    Such a world view, however, puts the president at odds with a large part of the US foreign policy establishment on both the left and the right, which, despite the traumas of Iraq, is still instinctively interventionist.

Some supporters worry that the president’s caution can become an excuse for inaction. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, says that he believes Mr. Obama often has the right instincts but that “he does not always translate that into diplomatic strategies to achieve his goals”.  Mr. Obama has added to the impression of dithering and inaction through his highly deliberative style of decision-making, which is in stark contrast to George W Bush’s reliance on gut instinct. The months of painstaking discussion in the first term over whether to put more troops into Afghanistan have been matched in the second term by a series of reviews of Syria policy, which have each ended with Mr. Obama deciding to do little.  The root cause of much of the angst about Mr. Obama has been his public wobble last September over whether to launch Tomahawk missiles against Syria, culminating in the walk on the White House lawn when he decided to punt the issue to Congress. Outside of the Middle East, few US allies were worried about the details of the proposed Syria strike: what rattled them was the sight of a US president making a threat and then deciding he did not have the political authority to carry through with it.  “We have lost some of the aura we used to enjoy in the region,” says Vali Nasr, a former state department official in Mr. Obama’s first term who has been a strong critic of the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Since then the humanitarian catastrophe of the Syrian war has only deepened, yet Mr. Obama has consistently resisted pressure from within his administration to do more. Even those aides who agree with his caution admit it has been an inglorious episode.

The unfolding events in Europe and Asia have also fed the perception of a US president losing his capacity to shape events abroad. At a time that the Pentagon budget is being cut, China is increasingly bent on pursuing its territorial claims and on challenging American naval dominance in the western Pacific.  In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been able to annex Crimea and to destabilize parts of the east of the country while the west has scrambled to come up with a response that will be effective in the short term. “While the wolf is eating the sheep, there is no shepherd to come to the rescue of the pack,” former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal told the FT.  The second, broader argument about the Obama presidency – that the US is disengaging from the world – is much harder to support. After all, the Afghanistan mission, which formally ends this year, is the longest-running conflict in US history.

The strongest complaints about American retrenchment have come from the Middle East. Yet even after the withdrawal from Iraq, the US military presence in the region remains formidable, following a dramatic expansion in recent decades. During the second term of Ronald Reagan, at the height of the cold war, the US had an average of 8,800 troops in the Middle East: it now has 35,000. “Over the years we have steadily militarized our approach to the Middle East, which has not always been in our interests,” says Dennis Blair, the retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence.  In some parts of the region and south Asia, Mr. Obama has provoked anger not for reticence over Syria, but for his aggressive use of drone strikes or cyber attacks against Iran.  Indeed, a significant part of the criticism from allies in the Middle East has been much less about the credibility of the American president and more about basic differences in interests. Washington’s biggest focus is preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon without starting a new war. The Saudis and Israelis, however, are incensed that the US would negotiate with a country they believe to be a rival for regional influence or an existential threat.  Many of the Sunni-dominated Gulf    nations see the Syrian war in sectarian terms and want to defeat Shia Iran. Yet the sectarian nature of the conflict is one of the main reasons the US is reluctant to get involved.

In Asia, the Obama administration is expanding America’s military presence, signing agreements with Australia and the Philippines for much greater access to bases and deepening co-operation with Japan. One explanation for recent Chinese assertiveness is that Mr. Obama has been pushing too hard rather than that he is considered a pushover.

Europe is the one place where the US military footprint has significantly shrunk. However, the case for a bigger American presence in Europe would be easier to make if European governments were not slashing their own defense budgets. Moreover, it is a stretch to suggest that Russia felt emboldened to annex Crimea because there were fewer US soldiers stationed in western Germany.  “We should worry less about putting more NATO troops in the Baltics, and more about whether there are disaffected Russian populations  that Putin can take advantage of,” says Thomas Graham, a former White House official under George W Bush.

Sometimes lost in Washington’s rancorous debates are the changes taking place in the world, the underlying shift in relative power that is being caused by the “rise of the rest”, the new generation of great powers that are staking their own claims.  The crises facing the administration are in many ways an early example of the harsh realities that a more multipolar world can bring.  Countries such as China and Russia appear to have found new ways to gradually chip away at US influence, pursuing territorial claims in Crimea or the South China Sea in a manner that fall well short of casus belli.  The fresh strategies that the US will require to meet this sort of challenge are rarely captured in the discussions about decisive presidential leadership.

Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama administration official now at the Brookings Institution, highlights this changed foreign policy landscape. “With such a structural shift in international politics, the US will need to operate in different ways, but we are still struggling to come to terms with the new reality,” he says.

There was Snowden but NOW there is Greenwald

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Actually we should all be grateful to Edward Snowden for what he revealed about the NSA and the sweeping indiscriminate spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant or approval. This caused a real debate and formal discussion where the checks and balances should be a mission of all citizens.

Snowden has the proof for the sake of validation but should there be limits to what is published globally?

Glen Greenwald along with some partnerships that included the founder of eBay has exposed worldwide documents that exposed sources and methods that likely has crossed the Rubicon. The debate has caused alarm and decisions are underway to address the intrusion into the privacy of common citizens. What is surfacing is social modeling and behavior control, something that has little attention, yet should.

Greenwald is publishing more yet to what end? The other question should be what is the solution to protect privacy, maintain limits of Constitutional protections and use of information for the sake of national security

The United States works with a few other countries that include the UK, Canada and Australia under an agreement and organization called GCHQ. While we are familiar with the NSA we are not so familiar with the UK’s eavesdropping operation called Menwith Hall.

Use of the social networking not only profiles all users regardless of their methods of communications, it does the same with terrorists, and it should. A deeper look is required however.

 

NSA GCHQ

How The NSA Uses Social Network Analysis To Map Terrorist Networks

Ever since The Guardian reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting the phone record metadata of millions of Americans, the cable talk circuit has been ablaze with pundits demanding answers to what should be obvious questions.

Who knew about the program to collect data? (Apparently, all three branches of government). Who else has been supplying data?  (Just about everybody, according to the Washington Post). What is metadata?  (It’s data about data).

The question that nobody seems to be asking is probably the most important one:  What is the NSA doing with the data and why do they need so much of it?  The answer is a relatively new field called social network analysis and, while it may make people uneasy, the benefits far outweigh the risks, so it is probably something we will just have to accept.

The New Science of Networks

The story of networks starts in 1736, long before the United States became a country, when Leonhard Euler set out to conquer a famous math problem concerning the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. To solve it, he created a new form of mathematics called graph theory, which concerned itself with links and nodes in a network.

In the 1950’s, interest renewed in Euler’s networks.  First, Anatol Rapoport introduced the concept of triadic closure, which asserted that networks grow when people meet through a central friend that they both know.  Later, Erdős and Rényi showed that as networks got bigger, communication among the people in the network got much more efficient.

In the 1970’s a sociologist named Mark Granovetter argued that we get most of our information not through close friends, but through weak ties and in the 1990’s Watts and Strogatz built on Granovetter’s work by showing that small clusters of people naturally organize themselves into far flung networks.

So by the late 1990’s, the small field of network analysis had built into a full fledged science and it was about to be applied to an increasingly important problem:  Terrorist networks.

Mapping Terrorist Networks

Valdis Krebs of Orgnet is a network scientist who in 2002 published a widely praised paper on mapping terrorist networks and has since consulted with the Defense Department on methods and approaches of evaluating and dismantling terrorist organizations.

It used to be that law enforcement officers would simply watch the two men closely, but in the era of global jihad, that’s much too slow to save lives.  The two might be peripheral to the conspiracy and it could take years before you could connect them to the leadership of the network, if ever.

Here’s where the data from Verizon and other companies comes in.  If you can analyze communication records, you can move much more quickly.  However, you don’t want to look at everyone the suspects talk to because you’ll end up with mostly incidental contacts, like friendly neighbors and delivery men.

But if you kept Rapoport’s concept of triadic closure in mind and had full access to communication records, you could look for contacts the two suspects have in common and start to build out a map of the conspiracy.  Read more here and see the graphic illustrations.

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Now is the time to question boundaries, collateral damage and protection results with regard to offensive measures against terrorists.

 

Our Salute to Josh and those Fallen Beside Him

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On Memorial Day we bless the fallen and on Veteran’s Day we bless the surviving veterans. But below, we have both and this is a moving story of what a Band of Brothers really is.

How One Army Ranger’s Salute Brought 50 Soldiers To Tears

by

One of the last things Army Ranger Josh Hargis did in Afghanistan on Oct. 6,  2013 was take a step toward a seemingly unarmed man.

 

Hargis’ Ranger unit “was conducting a mission to try to capture an HVT (High  Value Target), in the Panjwai district of Afghanistan,” according to the site Guardian of Valor.

Their post is based off multiple field reports of the  incident:

As several members of the Ranger unit  moved toward the man to begin questioning him, a woman wearing a suicide vest  emerged from the house and blew herself up, killing several members of the unit  instantly, along with [their] dog, and injuring others.

Hargis was flown to the nearest combat medical facility where he  was stabilized. Prior to his follow-on flight to Germany, the unit’s commander  organized a hasty bedside ceremony to award Hargis the Purple  Heart.

Later, Taylor Hargis, Josh’s wife, received a letter and an image from the commander,  describing what Josh did in response to the ceremony:

During the presentation the  Commander published the official orders verbally and leaned over Josh to thank  him for his sacrifice.

Josh, whom everybody in the room (over 50 people)  assumed to be unconscious, began to move his right arm under the blanket in a  diligent effort to salute the Commander as is customary during these ceremonies.  Despite his wounds, wrappings, tubes, and pain, Josh fought the doctor who was  trying to restrain his right arm and rendered the most beautiful salute any  person in that room had ever seen.

 

Josh

 

 

I cannot impart on you the level of emotion that  poured through the intensive care unit that day. Grown men began to weep and we  were speechless at a gesture that speaks volumes about Josh’s courage and  character.

Guardian of Valor dubbed it the “Salute heard round the world,”  and the officer wrote to Taylor that he thought the picture should be posted  “on every news channel and every news paper.”

“I have it hanging above my desk now,” he wrote, “and  will remember it as the single greatest event I have witnessed in my ten years  in the Army.”

Today, Hargis and his wife are expecting their first child. And this past March, Hargis participated in Warrior’s Walk, a 222-mile hike from Fort  Bennet, Georgia, to the National Infantry Museum in Columbus, Georgia.

 

 

No Place is Safe for Christians

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We have read that Iran jails Christians, we have read that in Egypt the Coptics are burned out of their churches, we have read that in Syria, Christians are either killed or have fled. But it gets worse as the worst place to be a Christian appears to be Pakistan.

Jihad America

The hardest place on earth to be a Christian

While there are many terrible places on earth to be a Christian (Sudan, North Korea, Afghanistan, Bhutan, etc.), Pakistan is arguably the worst. Other nations persecute believers, but in Pakistan the entire country has spent generations forming a world view that values the torturing of those that claim the name of Christ.

Pakistan used to have a noticeable Christian presence. Presbyterians had a sizeable school system, and those schools were largely responsible for the country’s relatively high literacy. But in 1973 Islam become the nation’s religion and the government seized those schools and replaced their teachers and curriculum. Now the Koran is required to be read and recited in all classes at all levels. When little kids learn science, they memorize passages about how Mohammad prophesied modern inventions. When they learn English, they learn it through the Koran. Meanwhile, it is illegal for Christians to touch or own the Koran.

Now, 40 years later, this plan was successful. Literacy in Pakistan is around 50%, but literacy for Christians is less than 10%. Universities require Koran memorization for entrance, so Christians are unable to hold any jobs which require an education. There are only a handful of believers who work for the government at any level. Christians are reduced to living in slums, where they are routinely robbed, and their houses frequently burned.

But that is not the worst of what happens to Christians there. The worst is that their children—particularly their young daughters—are the targets of violence. It is estimated by the few Christian organizations that track these things that around 3,000 Christian girls between the ages of 10-12 are kidnapped every year. Schools make Christians wear different uniforms than the other students, making them easy targets. They are forced to “convert” to Islam and marry Muslims (often becoming a man’s third or fourth wife), and their children are by law considered Muslim. Young kidnapped girls that refuse to convert and marry are beaten, physically tortured, and either killed or simply raped and left to die naked in the wilderness.

Christians do not have access to the legal system in Pakistan. By law, a Christian’s testimony carries only half credibility in court. Police must arrest Christians for any crime they are accused of, and they are really only accused of one crime: blasphemy, which carries an automatic death sentence. In perhaps the most perverse aspect of the legal system there, the government can say that they have never officially executed anyone for blasphemy because it is the lawyers who often carry out the execution before the trial.

Judges in Pakistan have been thoroughly intimidated by Al Qaeda.  They know that if they ever find a Christian innocent of blasphemy that the judge’s family will be murdered. A few years ago (when there were still lawyers who would defend Christians) a Christian was convicted of writing blasphemy against Mohamed, and her case was appealed to the Supreme Court. There it was shown that the accused was actually illiterate, and obviously incapable of writing. The judge acquitted her, and he was murdered the next day. Since then there have been no cases of Christians found “not guilty.” They usually don’t even survive to their trial.

This is an important point because in the last few years blasphemy charges against Christians have become more common. Two particular cases are well known by most Pakistanis, and they served as the model for the current wave of persecution. In 2009 two neighbors were having a property dispute—it essentially boiled down to who was responsible for a hole in the fence. One neighbor was Muslim, and the other was a Christian. The Muslim fabricated a charge of blasphemy, the police incited a crowd, and the Christian family was beaten. Eventually the police arrested the Christian woman (Asia Bibi), who was convicted of blasphemy. The mob seized her house and turned it over to her Muslim neighbors.

In 2011 a wedding was being hosted in the house of a Christian family. A group of Muslims wadded up pages of the Koran and threw them over the fence into the yard, and then summoned the authorities who arrested the bride. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Those two cases have made a pattern for the rest of the nation to follow. Christians are frequently falsely accused of blasphemy, arrested, and their houses are seized. If they lived in the slums (where most Christians live) it is likely that their entire neighborhood will be burned and turned into a mosque.

Because judges don’t want to hear these cases, and lawyers are afraid for their lives that they will not be seen as sufficiently hard against blasphemy, the most common outcome of these cases is that the accused are murdered by their lawyers.

In one of the most infamous cases, in 2012 a group of Muslims handed an 11-year-old Christian girl a bag with burned pages from a school book. The girl would have simply been kidnapped and forced to convert, but because she had Down’s Syndrome, they did not want to marry her to a Muslim. Instead, she was asked her to bring the bag home with her, and a mob then surrounded her house. She was arrested and charged with blasphemy, because the school book contained passages from the Koran. Because this story was picked up by international news, she was not immediately killed. Eventually she was given asylum in Canada.

This kind of extremism has essentially succeeded. Today in Pakistan, Christians cannot read. Their daughters are kidnapped. It is nearly impossible for Christians to get an education, and there are no jobs for them. Their houses are attacked, they have no access to the police, and parents are afraid to teach their children the basics of the gospel—out of fear that their children may say something that will get them killed.

I spoke with a Pakistani pastor this week, and asked him how its possible that so much of the population in Pakistan goes along with something that is so barbarically evil. He pointed out that Christians grow up talking about love, singing about love, and esteeming love. Thus their world view is formed by love. Pakistanis grow up in a school system that talks about Jihad, hates Christians, and from an early age everyone is taught that Christians are deserving of death. It forms their world view.

That observation has been backed by outsiders. In 2011 the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom completed a study of the educational structure in Pakistan. They reported that “all” of the public school teachers they interviewed taught their students that Jihad was the violent struggle against infidels and that it is “compulsory” for Muslims to be violent toward Christians (see pg. 16 of that report). Pakistan is a nation where nearly all—if not all—of the teachers, at every level of education, teach their children to kill Christians.

If you ever meet a Pakistani Christian, ask for his story. Ask how persecution affected his family. Strive to encourage them in anyway possible. There is really no way to give to the church there. They need audio Bibles (because of illiteracy), but other than that, this is not really a problem that money can fix. Instead, please be faithful to pray for the few believers that remain in that dark country.