Saleem Masih, a 22-year-old Christian farmhand, was tortured and killed for using his Muslim employer's water well.... The employer later insisted that he had committed no crime; it was the murdered Christian who had "committed a crime by dirtying" their water, his murderer insisted, and therefore his punishment — torture and death — was "justified." — CLAAS, February 28, Pakistan.

"Are we to deny the evidence before us, of kidnappers separating Muslims from infidels or compelling Christians to convert or die?" — Matthew Hassan Kukah, Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Zenit.org, February 12, 2020, Nigeria.

"Christians are losing everything they own without an actual legal basis. They are losing everything Christians have worked for over the course of history." — Fr. Slavomir Dadas, Aid to the Church in Need, February 6, 2020, Turkey.

"Another Christian girl aged 14 was recently abducted and gang-raped by some Muslim youths... The abductors not only raped her but also obtained her signatures and thumb impressions on some papers." Although police recovered her, the rights activist "fears the suspects will use her signed documents to produce a fake marriage certificate and religion conversion letter in a bid to escape abduction and rape charges," which, he said, "is common modus operandi of Muslims to confuse the court and avoid justice." — Napoleon Qayyum, executive director of the Pakistan Center of Law of Justice, Morningstar News, February 12, 2020, Pakistan.

While it is morally right to help any community or individual unjustly persecuted or forced to live in squalor, the historical record shows that Israel did not launch the wars against it, nor inspire terrorism, nor perpetuate the multi-generational refugee crisis, nor force Palestinians to remain in camps without citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, or (partly) in Jordan.

We must ask why so many secular liberals, Christians, and a minority of Jews do not grasp that negotiations based on... Islamic law can never play any role in current international law and can never bring peace to the Middle East. This longing to replace Western law with Islamic law inspires not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Islamic State, and, as we have seen, the entire Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

It is the Jews, not the Arabs, who have been for 3,000 years, the indigenous people on that land, and it has been the Arabs, not the Jews, who are the settler-colonialists in the territory. Arabs first entered Palestine in and after the year 634, when it was invaded by Muslim conquerors -- a fact recognized by every Islamic history down the centuries.

"Other stateless peoples can only dream of being offered independence and $50bn by the US president... offers of a kind that Chechens, Kurds, Baluchis, Tibetans and dozens of other stateless people would have jumped at." — Tom Gross, journalist, Mideast Dispatch Archive, January 30, 2020.

There are several fundamental problems with the "deal" touted by the administration as a ticket to peace in a land torn by war since the 1970s. To start with, it is not at all certain that the cast of characters that negotiated the "deal" actually do represent the Taliban.... Like the Mafia in Italy, it included a large number of "families" who came together... to set up an "Islamic emirate...." Today, we could identify a dozen groups of different sizes claiming the brand.... The only thing that unites the cartel members is a common dream to recapture Kabul and restore the "emirate" that allowed them to rule their patches of territory as they pleased.

The "deal" itself is a model of dangerous naiveté. It aims at exchanging something tangible and easily verifiable, that is to say the withdrawal of American troops, against something intangible and not easily verifiable in the form of a promise to prevent terrorist acts against American interests. More importantly, there is no mechanism for making the Taliban dealmakers pay for failure to honor it.

Any peace deal should be aimed at finding a place for them within the new Afghanistan, not the other way around, that is to say reshaping this new Afghanistan the way the mullahs want. They should disarm, accept the constitutional frame and seek a share of power through the ballot box.

Next, despite zigzags, the new Afghanistan, though cumbersome, corrupt and chaotic is stumbling forward on the right path; it is far better, or less bad, than anything the Taliban could or would offer.... The US won the war and the Taliban lost. The only way to peace, since the start of history, has been for those who lost to submit to the will of those who won.