ACTION

via Raping and Beheading the Faithful.

Muslims beheading Christians was a visibly growing spectacle throughout the month of August. Islamic State [IS] militants cut off a Christian man’s head—after compelling him to say the shehada, the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” When the shehada is spoken before Muslim witnesses, the speaker becomes Muslim and thus, in theory, safeguards his life and possessions from the jihad. Not so for this hapless man, who, after renouncing his Christian faith for Islam, was still slaughtered on camera (graphic video can be viewed here).

The Christian Post has the story:

A Christian man in Syria recently had his head brutally hacked off by Islamic militants after being forced to deny his faith and salute Mohammed as “the messenger of God”.

The incident was caught on video for the world to see and broadcast as a warning to “everyone like him”.

In the video that was posted to YouTube with translated captions, the helpless Christian man is surrounded by armed militants wearing masks and he is heard reciting as instructed: “There is no God but God and I testify that Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

An apparent leader in the group of militants is then heard instructing the group: “No one will shoot him now, do you understand? He will not be killed by shooting because it is merciful for him.”

“He will be beheaded because he is Kaffir, non-Muslim, sided [with] the government and was not praying at all. Everyone like him will have the same end, beheading,” said the militant.

A militant armed with a machete then grabs the defenseless man by the hair and begins to cut his head from his body as the group cries “Allahu Akbar… there is no God but God.”

Apparently inspired by the spate of beheadings conducted by the Islamic State, a female British convert to Islam, who is believed to have relocated to IS-controlled territories, “is threatening to behead Christians with a blunt knife,” according to the Daily Mail. Umm Hussain al-Britani—formerly Sally Jones of Chatham, a member of an all-girl rock band and single mother of two—warned in messages since deleted “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at raqqa … Come here I’ll do it for you!”

In Nigeria, the Islamic group Boko Haram, which seeks to enforce Islamic law over the whole African nation, beheaded a six-year-old boy, because he was Christian. During Sunday church services, over 100 Islamic militants descended upon Attagara, a Christian-majority village. With machetes and machine guns, they slaughtered men, women, and children.

According to Christian Today, “One villager, Sawaltha Wandala, was arriving at church for the second service when he saw children being massacred. One six-year-old boy had been slashed and thrown into a ditch, but he was alive. Wandala picked him up and was carrying him to a hospital in Cameroon, when he was stopped by five of the militants. The men reportedly took the child from Wandala’s arms and beheaded him, then began beating the 55-year-old with tree branches. After striking him in the head with a rock, they left him for dead.”

Another Christian man, John Yakuba, was told by Boko Haram members, “You must convert to Islam or else you will die a painful death.”

When Yakuba refused to denounce Christ, they tied his arms and legs to a tree, and hacked his hands with a knife.

“Can you become a Muslim now?” the militants asked.

“You can kill my body, but not my soul,” Yakuba cried out.

The men continued to cut his feet and back with a machete and knife to torture him.

“We will show you,” they said.

Yakuba’s head was slashed, and an axe was driven into his knee, reaching the bone.

He lost consciousness and was left tied to the tree for three days before someone found him, after which he was taken to the hospital in a coma.

In a separate attack by Boko Haram, where approximately 100 people from a Christian-majority region were killed, a survivor reported: “I thank God for sparing my life, but three of my neighbors and members of our church were killed during the attack. These Christians in our village had their throats slit with knives while their hands were tied behind their backs. Some houses were bombed as the Boko Haram gunmen were chanting, ‘God is great!’ in Arabic.”

In Kenya, militants from the Somali Al Shabaab Islamic organization abducted a group of traders near the resort island of Lamu, and drove them into a dense forest. The militants eventually released three of them, because they were Muslims, but beheaded the fourth, a Christian.

While “infidel” Christian men were beheaded, Christian women—including children—were raped and enslaved in various regions of the Islamic world.

In Iraq, approximately 1,500 Christian and other minorities not able to escape the advance of the Islamic State were gang-raped and sold as sex slaves, some for as little as $25. A joint statement by two senior UN officials declared that “Atrocious accounts of abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkomen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner.” One young woman, who managed to hide a mobile phone in the prison, spoke of horrific experiences, including being raped by dozens of men over a few hours. Other women said children born out of rape were ripped from their mothers’ arms, and never seen again.

In Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where Christians make up less than one percent of the population, dozens of men armed with machetes, knives and iron rods attacked the convent of Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions nuns in Boldipuku, a village mission in north Bangladesh. “The nuns were beaten and molested, ending when police arrived,” reported Bishop Sebastian Tudu. According to Catholic Online,

“[S]ome 60 men attempted to loot the building and rape the nuns… The attackers first tied the hands and legs of the mission’s two night watchmen and gagged them in the early morning hours …. Three PIME nuns suffered attempted rape and were sent to their provincial house in Dhaka, the national capital where they are trying to overcome the shock and mental suffering.”

In Pakistan, yet another Christian girl, 12-year-old Muqadas (“Sacred”), was raped by a gang of Muslim men. The girl, who worked as a maid for a Muslim family, was returning home from work,

“when Muqadas was kidnapped by two Muslim men and three women. They took her inside a school (which was closed) and the two men, identified as Ashraf Alias Achi and Ghaffor Alias Paida raped her repeatedly in turn. The girl was later abandoned.”

As usual, for filing a complaint with local police, her family received threats of more violence. According to the family’s Christian lawyer, Sardar Mushtaq Gill,

“In Pakistan rape is used as an instrument of arbitrary power over Christian girls, who come from poor and marginalized families. It is a form of violence that wants to reiterate the submission to Muslims. The rest of society is not outraged because the victims mostly belong to religious minorities, who are the most vulnerable. Rarely rapists are punished. Furthermore, rape victims face terrible difficulties; they do not receive adequate medical treatment for sexual assault. Many girls are traumatized and become depressed and in need of psychological assistance.”

(See here for more on the sexual abuse of Christian minors in Pakistan.) For his troubles, Gill, a vocal human rights activist who represents abused Christians, was again targeted for assassination: his home was sprayed with bullets overnight, for the second time.

Although beheadings and rape in the Islamic world may seem distant from the minds of most in the West, the exiled Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, warned the West that its turn will come. In an interview, Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona, said:

Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.

Please, try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think all men are equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.

The rest of August’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.

Muslim Attacks on Churches

Muslim Attacks on Converts to Christianity

Dhimmitude: Islamic Discrimination Against Christianity

Previous reports

Read it all at gatestoneinstitute.