Most of us had never heard of Terry Jones before last week, but he is now a household name around the world. Whether you agree with Pastor Jones and his announced plan to burn Qurans, which apparently has now been cancelled, he has initiated an extremely important discussion that we, as Christians, need to have.

For years, Muslims have acted with impunity in their destruction of the religious symbols of other religions – they have destroyed and disrespected Churches (remember the actions of Palestinians at the Church of the Nativity in 2002?), destroyed Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus (also in 2002), have destroyed a number Hindu temples and destroyed the Buddhas of Bamyan, in Afghanistan, in March 2001.

So, it is with previous Muslim actions that we must look at Terry Jones’ plan. Why is it that we allow Muslims to dominate the discourse? Why do we stand by idly and hardly make a peep when Muslims come after us, our holy places and objects that are dear to us (and other non-Muslims)? I recently came across this piece from 2007 when Muslims in Gaza burned bibles and destroyed crosses. They didn’t just announce that they WOULD do it – they actually DID it. And our reaction? Most of us didn’t even know about it to have a reaction! Why is it that when Muslims don’t like something, the whole world knows, but when Christians don’t like something, nobody hears about it? The fact is, we act scared of Muslims when they intimidate us, but they’re not afraid of us when they hurt us!

This Terry Jones episode has been a telling story about the state of our world – Muslims are offended, they threaten, the rest of the world backs down. Muslims offend us, we take it. We can only see this getting worse…

In this video, a number of Muslims make it very clear that the “72 Virgins in Heaven” is an important factor in the decision to perform a suicide bombing. The part that makes me cringe the most is the three girls interviewed at the 4:00 mark in the video, praising the murder of innocents with a smile on their faces. Their religion has taught them to be believe the cold-blooded murder is a good thing, only because the victims don’t believe in the same ideals as they do. Not to mention that suicide bombing doesn’t discriminate between Muslims and “infidels” – anybody can be a victim of a suicide bomb. Please watch:

Facebook has a PR issue on their hands and we can only hope that they do not cave into the demands of the Muslims behind this issue. Muslim Facebook users are upset at the removal of 4 pages:

Facebook.com/Rassoul.Allaah
Facebook.com/Logo.Ramadan
LikesFacebook.com/I.Love.Mohammed
Facebook.com/Quran.Lovers

We, at Christians for Israel, going to be presumptuous and say that these users/groups/pages were contravening Facebook’s terms of use or even breaking the law. However, “2.5 million Muslims” don’t care about these issues and are threatening to boycott Facebook, in favor of going to madina.com, a Muslim social networking site.

We think it’s fair to say that there are a few Muslim idiots who are hoping to gain traction (and republishing this story, no doubt, helps their cause), but that the actual number that would carry through and actually close their account would be in the thousands at most. I mean, really, are people going to leave Facebook for Madina.com? Most Muslims realize there is a world outside of Islam…and that it’s better than their world! (And all this makes me think that this is just a publicity stunt by the folks at Madina.com – I bet today made them grow much more than any other day since they launched!)

Their demands to the Facebook team are:

1. Reactivating the four pages that have been disabled
2. Adding a Facebook Term that illegalizes disrespecting all Islamic religious symbols, including Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and the Qur’an, as well as Prophet Moses (PBUH), Prophet Jesus (PBUH), and the original Bible
3. Disabling any Facebook Page, Group, or Event that shows direct or indirect disrespect towards Islamic religious symbols

In other words, Muslims want to be able to have carte blanche to insult and harass anybody (including the Christians for Israel facebook fanpage, which is routinely spammed by Muslims who can’t spell), but expect the world to bend over backwards for them.

As we said before, we hope Facebook upholds their decision to remove these pages and continue pursuing users/groups/pages that are actually insulting to most Facebook users. For more information, see the article on the NBC Website. We were hoping to include information about how to contact the folks at Facebook, but alas, it appears they don’t make it too easy!

Palestinians, for the last 40 or so years, have been claiming that they’ve existed since time immemorial. However, Joseph Farah, one of the first Christian Arabs to come out in strong defense of Israel, wrote in 2002 that “Palestinian people do not exist“, and he, of course, is right!

Instead of compiling opinions of this matter from world leaders and the press, Farah goes straight to the source – the PLO/Palestinian Authority. Here are some beautiful quotes that he compiles:

Zahir Muhsein, Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee member, 1977: ‘The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.’

Yassir Arafat, Palestinian Liberation Organization leader, 1993: ‘Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.’ This quote, by the way, confirms a recent post we wrote about the Palestinian’s Phased Plan of 1974.

It is interesting to read this article from 8 years ago – the issues have not changed at all. There is still an intransigent Palestinian Authority that resists peace at every move, a press that despises the state of Israel and the Israelis still standing tall and proud as the only (militarily unenforced) democracy in the Middle East.