Hate crimes should draw outrage from Muslims

John Meinhold
Portsmouth
14/5/2011

Last week, scenes of Muslim mob violence against Coptic Christians in Cairo was alarming. However, extreme hate crimes being waged against Christians by Muslims is often ignored by the world media.

The Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Irinej recently said that Christian Serbs in Kosovo live in “constant fear.” The ethnic Albanians residing in Kosovo, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, have been pursuing relentless violence toward Serbian Christians.

The pogrom against Christians in Kosovo includes the macabre desecration of grave sites. Just before Easter this year, a land mine was discovered in a Christian cemetery in Kosovo. According to a 2010 U.N. Mission in Kosovo report, “the coffin of the first Serb to be buried at the Gjilan/Gnjilane town Orthodox cemetery since 1999 was vandalized. Members of the Kosovo Serb community perceived the event as a warning against their return.”

In the last decade, some 150 Kosovo Christian churches and monasteries, and hundreds of tombstones, have been destroyed or vandalized. The barbaric terrorism was highlighted in a two-day rampage in March 2004 when the bones of buried Christians were unearthed and thrown. Even the crypt of Serbian Orthodox Saint Joanikije was torn open and his bones burned.

This desecration of Christian burial sites is not a new form of Muslim terrorism. The Ottoman Turkish Muslims burned the bones of the most revered Saint in Serbia, Saint Sava, in 1594. Where is the outrage from the Muslim community against these barbaric hate crimes?

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