Contemplating the horrors of young Christian girls in Pakistan being forced into marriage and conversion to Islam, I can’t help thinking it is linked in spirit with anti-Israel butchery.

According to Anna Townsend in her book Our Sisters (Authentic Media), these girls, some as young as 12 and 13, are abducted, abused and raped, forced to sign marriage certificates and adopt the Muslim religion or risk seeing their families killed.

Interviewing a series of girls who have somehow, after much trauma, managed to escape their captors, you get the feeling the author is dealing with the tip of the iceberg.

In the upside-down world of Pakistan’s police and justice system, it is the victims who are often arrested while the perpetrators are set free to continue their cruel bullying crusades against innocent young Christians.

At the heart of the problem are the country’s blasphemy laws used against minority faiths (including Hindus) to leave them cowering in submission to the only acceptable cultural norm.

Most of the charges are trumped up and used as an excuse to persecute those who refuse to submit to Allah which in turn has the effect of keeping Christian communities in poverty with so many forms of useful employment denied them.

Worse still, the blasphemy laws are hugely popular with the public, as was apparent with the much-publicised case of Asia Bibi, which meant that those brave enough to support her became a target for assassination.

The brutal treatment suffered by the girls Anna has interviewed is fostered in a culture which deems non-Muslims as virtually sub-human – ominously comparable to the way Nazis viewed Jews and others. And yet it seems to me that Pakistan gets away with this in the international arena in stark contrast to the way Israel is frequently portrayed as a pariah.

Not only that, but the idea is being exported to the UK whose present government is trying every trick in the book to introduce a blasphemy law here. But who is being blasphemed in our once Christian country? None other than the Lord Jesus Christ – on TV screens and public arenas in general.

As for the Nazi spirit that deems Jews as sub-human, it is now brazenly paraded through street marches and vicious attacks in the UK, with relatively little resistance from the authorities or the wider public. This is the very spirit at the heart of the Middle East conflict; it goes back thousands of years and is dressed up in all kinds of geopolitical justification.

But it ultimately reflects rebellion against what God has ordained, specifically his plan for his chosen people to live at peace in the land of Canaan. Yet despite every attempt to wipe them out and bring God’s plans to nought, the Jews are still there – and thriving!

Their enemies will eventually hang themselves on the antisemitic noose they have built for others, just as the German cities were bombed to smithereens as World War II drew to a close.

I applaud all the efforts to raise the plight of Pakistan’s Christian girls, but few seem to realise that the brutality of their oppressors is a mirror image of that shown to the Jewish people by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. Israel’s affliction is the big picture of what’s happening to these girls. And we must pray and work for them both. Those whom God has called have a common enemy.

It just so happens that, as I write, a 302-page report has been published on the barbaric orgy of violence carried out by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 – the most comprehensive account of the atrocity yet. Words fail to convey the true depth of depravity meted out during the massacre of 1,200 Jewish victims, with 250 then taken hostage to suffer further humiliation.

Much of the horror was of a deeply degrading and sickeningly savage sexual nature, often involving gang rapes, followed by execution, with gross mutilation of genitals a persistent factor. And these are people whom our government has ‘rewarded’ by recognising a non-existent Palestinian state.

In their May 12 report of the document, the Daily Mail explained that it wouldn’t normally print such horrors. “But the lies of those on the Left who deny it happened cannot be allowed to stand.”

I note, with special interest, that “hostages were sexually assaulted, humiliated, threatened with forced marriage, and forced to witness abuse.” And now we learn that Pakistan have reportedly helped the chief sponsor of the Hamas butchers hide military aircraft from US/Israeli strikes (World Israel News, May 12, 2026).

Something of a contrast to their neighbour, India, whose Prime Minister Narendra Modi is quoted as saying: “Israel is a protective wall against barbarism.”

Israelis, both Arab and Jew, have for years suffered constant stress and trauma living under bombardment from neighbouring countries threatening and brutalising them. They can’t live normal lives of peace and security, attend school or conduct business and host tourists. They are forever running to bomb shelters, anticipating those dreaded sirens and living in perpetual fear and trepidation.

And even though, after 2,000 years of exile, they should be safe in their own homeland, there is a sense in which they too remain shackled and imprisoned by Jew hatred. For the spirit that drives the ugly brutality meted out to Christian girls in Pakistan – girls who love Jesus, the Jew – comes from the same antisemitic source that motivates Hamas and Hezbollah. The DNA is a perfect match.

Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; To the Jew First, A Nation Reborn, and King of the Jews, all available from Christian Publications International.