Muslim Terrorists Storm Kenyan University, Death Toll at 147

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There is confusion as to whether the siege and rescue operation by Kenyan security units is over or whether hostages are still being held.

Hundreds of students are still unaccounted for and the death toll is expected to rise.

The university has a mixed population of Christian and Muslim students. Christians were reportedly targeted for immediate execution or taken as hostages. Muslims were released.

Collins Wetangula, the vice chairman of the student union, said he was preparing to take a shower when he heard gunshots. 

When the gunmen arrived at his dorm he could hear them opening doors and asking if the people who had hidden inside whether they were Muslims or Christians. "If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot," Wetangula told the associated Press. "With each blast of the gun I thought I was going to die."

Students thought posted warnings of a possible attack were an April Fool's prank.

Stories: Daily Mail, Fox News, USA Today.

Live news feeds: News24 (South Africa), The Telegraph, MirrorUK.

Muslim Terrorist Attacks on Christians: A Global Comparison

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Dogo Nahawa Massacre, Nigeria, 2010: Over 500 Christians--mostly women and children--are hacked to death by Muslim attackers screaming "Allah Akbar!"

The always useful Religion of Peace website has compiled a running list of Muslim terrorist attacks on Christians since 9/11. As of the end of March it lists 1,242 attacks in 51 countries and territories, totaling 9,161 deaths and 12,003 injuries. It's a morbid subject, obviously, but it's also important. I believe the authors try to stick to a consistent and fair methodology. Here are some notes on it:

1. Tens of thousands of 21st century Christians have been martyred for many reasons and by numerous hostile groups--including members of various non-Christian religions and anti-Christian ideologies--but only attacks by Muslims are counted.
2. Only attacks on Christians where they were almost certainly singled out and targeted as Christians are counted. Thus, few of the most well-known Muslim terrorist attacks are counted--since the victims of those attacks were for the most part targeted indiscriminately.
3. The list includes some personal actions--a Muslim father murdering his daughter because she converted to Christianity--religiously motivated attacks by lone or unaffiliated attackers, mob actions, premeditated attacks by recognized terrorist groups and war crimes by quasi-military units.
4. Due to reporting and other considerations it no doubt leaves out many other occurrences, ranging from more personal attacks to quasi-military actions.
5. The list does not include attacks or human rights violations by governments.
6. 87% of the attacks involved at least one fatality and 48% involved at least two fatalities.
7. For the most part, each attack was labeled by country, though there are a few exceptions--attacks in the Muslim areas of the Russian Federation are broken out by territory and there are a few non-national territories included, such as Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority.
8. There are no links on the site's list but each attack is easily verifiable due to the inclusion of a date and a relatively unique description of the event.

We put together a summary of the data, based on recorded casualties, ranking the results by % of total casualties per country, and by % of total casualties by country controlling for population:

Total Casualties by Number and % of Total:

Nigeria 11,377 54%
Egypt 1,601 8%
Iraq 1,541 7%
Pakistan 1,223 6%
Syria 1,220 6%
Indonesia 1,032 5%
Philippines 934 4%
Lebanon 346 2%
Sudan 311 1%
Kenya 305 1%
Bangladesh 251 1%
Central African Republic 226 1%
Somalia 120 1%
Ethiopia 109 1%
Other 568 3%

% of Total Casualties by Country, Controlling for Population:

Lebanon 19%
Nigeria 16%
Syria 12%
Central African Republic 11%
Iraq 11%
Egypt 4%
Philippines 2%
Somalia 2%
Kenya 2%
Sudan 2%
Libya 2%
Pakistan 1%
Israel 1%
Kosovo 1%
Liberia 1%
Indonesia 1%
Palestinian Authority 1%
Macedonia 1%
Saudi Arabia 1%

Tentative Conclusions:

1. Much of this is not a surprise. That Nigeria tops the list, accounting for over half of the total casualties, is not unexpected.
2. However, it might be a surprise that, controlling for population, Lebanon is even more dangerous.
3. Virtually all of the casualties are in the Middle East, Africa and South and South East Asia--areas that to one extent or another are not fully covered by Western media.
4. Population is total population, not total Christian population. Thus, for example, Pakistan is almost certainly a more dangerous place for Christians than the numbers might indicate.
5. All attacks since 9/11 are given equal weight. I suspect that some areas--Syria and Iraq--would appear much more dangerous if only recent results were counted.

The number of Christians killed and injured on this list is horrific, and as a Catholic I have no doubt that many of the dead were and will be recognized as martyrs. But it is notable and perhaps odd that virtually none of the Christians killed were public personalities. For example, I believe the list includes only one bishop and very few well-known priests, ministers or Christian laymen. (One exception might be the Orthodox priest Daniel Sysoev, murdered in 2009, who became locally famous in Russia for evangelizing within the Moscow Muslim community.)

By contrast, there have been numerous well-known non-Christians and atheists murdered, including the Bangladeshi bloggers cited in the previous post, the Charlie Hebdo journalists, and the Dutch anti-Islam figures Pym Fortune and Theo van Gogh. And of course there are a number of others, such as Salmon Rushdie, who have lived for many years under the threat of death.

Why this is the case is a question I hope to answer in another post. It almost certainly reflects well on the bravery of some contemporary atheists. And by the same token probably reflects badly on the current state of organized Christianity and the Catholic Church, especially in Western countries.

If atheists, such as Oyasiqur Rahman are willing to sacrifice their lives to tell the truth about a violent, tyrannical and soul destroying religion, where are, say, the Catholic priests and bishops? And where is the Pope, or is he too busy bragging about riding in a used car?

ISIS Fighters are the New International Brigadistas

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Oh darn. She had such a bright future in England.

From 1936 to 1939, during the Spanish Civil War, 2,000-4,000 Britons went to fight for the Republicans--the anti-Franco forces that eventually lost. The standard narrative is that these were the good guys. George Orwell, Stephen Spender and all that. The standard narrative is wrong.

Read Homage to Catalonia, especially the first section. Orwell, who would become famous for describing a totalitarian Hell in his 1984 a few years later, described a totalitarian Hell in Barcelona. But here he was in favor of it:

Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping was forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Again, remember, this was written by someone on their side.

Change "workers" to "Muslims", the hammer and sickle to the crescent and star, and you will have something a bit like Raqqa, the capital of the new ISIS "Caliphate":

"Inside the city, the signs of destruction are obvious on some government buildings and homes,"...FSA brigades and civil society activists tried to change street names in Raqqa. Tal Abyad Street, the city's most popular, was renamed after martyr Ali al-Babinsi. However, people keep using the old name. In any case, very few people know its official name in city records, which is al-Qunaytirah Road. Martyr Basel al-Assad Street was turned into Colonel Hussein Harmoush Street and al-Jalaa or "Clock" Roundabout became Freedom Square. "Mr. President Square" is now Martyrs’ Square, but people on both sides call it after the nearby fire station. Civil society activists had also painted some of the city's statues with the colors of the "revolutionary flag." However, ISIS removed the "flag of infidels" and raised its banners everywhere...Alaa Jubran, a resident of Raqqa who was there on a recent visit, told Al-Akhbar, "Street vendors do not occupy the city's sidewalks anymore. ISIS established a popular market in the city center. It was equipped to include the vendors and traveling salesmen, banning them from using the streets." ISIS transferred the busy Friday market next to Raqqa's old wall, a historical site, and moved moved market day to Thursday so it would not distract people from attending Friday prayers in the mosque. It also created a consumer protection office and imposed monthly payments on commercial establishments, in return for sanitation, electricity, water, and phone services. At a later stage, this will be extended to civilians to ensure the continuity of services. Two signs in particular are hanging in shop windows. "Sisters, please do not remove the niqab inside the shop," said one. The other announced that "work stops 10 minutes before prayers." Prayer rooms were established in public venues and streets become almost empty before prayer times, save for ISIS’ patrols...The Islamist Traffic Police is on every street and market, wearing the same uniform, conducting traffic, and issuing tickets. Inside official buildings and facilities, the staff is committed to serving the citizens. Emergency vehicles of the water and electricity departments are rushing to fix problems all the time. On the other hand, the recently created Islamic Services Authority supervises state institutions. The Accounts Bureau monitors the markets, sales operations, applying sharia, and holding violators accountable. The official weekend is now on Thursday and Friday. 

The Spanish Civil War featured the highest proportion of Catholic priests, brothers and nuns murdered or driven into exile of any anti-Catholic eruption in history. And the Republicans didn't just go after the living religious. One of their favorite pastimes was to dig up the bodies of priests and nuns and put them on display in front of Churches. Sometimes they would waltz with the corpses.

See, God has no power over us, we can waltz with corpses.

Charming.

ISIS doesn't dig up corpses (as far as I know). They just smash archeological artifacts.

And kill Christians.

Charming.

One other difference, of course, is that the International Brigadistas fought against God. The ISIS Brigadistas fight to support a false God. What's better? Unfortunately, the results are somewhat similar.

As a number of British news sources have reported, for example, here and here, the number of Britons joining ISIS is on track to match the number joining the Spanish Republicans in the 1930's.

Barcelona, 1936. Raqqa, 2015. It's, you know, so romantic.

Or as someone once said of another totalitarian Hell, "It's tough, kid, but it's life."

"Don't forget to pack a wife."

Why are so many attracted to this sort of thing?