The American Spectator

* Last year in Turkey five Islamic extremists bound, tortured, and killed three Christian religious workers.

* In Malaysia the nation’s highest court ruled that a Christian convert could not change her official religious affiliation without a ruling of apostasy in Sharia court — punishable by death or prison.

* Earlier this year Christian converts in Bangladesh were beaten and expelled by Muslim villagers.

* Last year in Sudan demonstrators demanded death for a British teacher — convicted and then deported — for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.”

* In 2006 the Afghan government, which survives only because of allied military forces, sentenced a Christian convert to death, before allowing him to emigrate for reason of “mental illness.”

* In Nigeria last year a Muslim mob murdered ten Christians, injured scores more, and destroyed nine churches in response to a claim that a Christian student drew a cartoon of Mohammed on the mosque wall at school.

* In Iraq in early March the body of kidnapped Chaldean Archbishop Paulus Faraj Rahho was discovered. Up to half of the prewar community of 1.2 or so million Iraqi Christians have fled abroad.

So it goes throughout the Islamic world. Not every Muslim hates Christians, Jews, and members of other faiths. And no, not every Muslim country persecutes religious minorities.

But pick any persecuting nation at random. There is a good chance that it will be Muslim, even if it is formally allied with the U.S. government.

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW that from the Western reaction. Right now, talk of interfaith dialogue and Muslim persecution is in the air.

Last November more than 300 Protestant leaders publicly asked for forgiveness for Christian sins against “our Muslim neighbors.” Vatican officials and Islamic leaders have been meeting to plan an interfaith summit. President George W. Bush recently named a special envoy to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is dedicated to combating “Islamophobia.”

Fine. But the first item on every agenda should be the fact that most Islamic nations persecute their religious minorities.

This matters because persecution is an affront to any faith which claims to speak on behalf of a loving God. The hypocrisy of Muslim regimes that complain about the treatment of their co-religionists in the West while brutalizing members of minority faiths at home is more rank than usual. Consider the predictable protests in these very same Islamic nations against the online release of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders’s film criticizing Islam.

Pervasive hostility and violence towards Christians and Jews provides a flourishing environment for Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists. The fact that most Muslims may not share these attitudes is irrelevant if they remain silent in the fact of violent attacks on members of other faiths.

Westerners need to speak truth to Muslim power. “Islamic aggression, hatred, and intolerance must be confronted, named and shamed,” argues Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern (ICC).