Smoky Mountains Sunrise
Showing posts with label Islamic Genocide of Christians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamic Genocide of Christians. Show all posts

Friday, March 18, 2016

US Declares that ISIS is Committing Genocide Against Christians

US Secretary of State John Kerry (PA)

US Secretary of State says ISIS is genocidal in both its ideology and actions towards Yazidis, Christians and Shia

The US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that ISIS’s atrocities should be classed as genocide.

His declaration opens the way to much greater involvement from America and other countries in protecting ISIS’s victims and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

In a statement, Kerry said: ‘In my judgment, Daesh [ISIS] is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims.

“Daesh is genocidal by self-declaration, by ideology, and by actions – in what it says, what it believes, and what it does.”

Read more at The Catholic Herald >>


Monday, March 14, 2016

New Report Details Genocide Committed by Islamic State Against Christians

Document calls on the US State Department to recognise the genocide
 
Iraqi Christian refugees attend an outdoor prayer service to mark a year since their displacement in Fuheis, Jordan (AP Photo/Raad Adayleh)

Christians in Libya, Iraq and Syria are victims of a genocide carried out by the Islamic State, according to a report issued by the Knights of Columbus and In Defense of Christians.

The 278-page document was released in Washington, a week before a congressionally mandated deadline for the Department of State to announce if genocide was being committed against religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and North Africa by the Islamic State.

It argues that the case for genocide exists and called on Secretary of State John Kerry to make such a declaration and to include Christians in it.

Read more at The Catholic Herald >>





Thursday, December 5, 2013

An Ironic Ecumenism: The Global War on Christians (Part 2)

If I asked you to name the country that has witnessed the single greatest outburst of anti-Christian violence in recent years, you'd probably guess somewhere like North Korea or an Islamic country such as Egypt.

You'd be wrong. The answer is India. As John L. Allen tells us in his new book, "The Global War on Christians," in 2008, "a series of riots [in the state of Orissa] ended with as many as five hundred Christians killed." Even more shocking than the number of those killed was the way they were killed: "many were hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals."

By the time the violence ended, "thousands more were injured, and at least fifty thousand were left homeless."

Unlike North Korea or Saudi Arabia, the perpetrators were not government officials but private individuals and groups, acting with the implicit and sometimes explicit approval of local officials.

Thus, after a nun was "raped, marched naked through the streets and beaten," local "police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report and declined to arrest her attackers."

Read more at The Christian Post >>

Monday, December 2, 2013

Paying in Blood: The Global War on Christians (Part 1)


Sometime in November, the North Korean regime publicly executed eighty people in seven cities across the country. In each instance, a crowd was forced to watch as ten people, their heads covered with white bags, were tied to stakes and machine gunned to death.

The "crimes" for which these people were put to death were "watching or illegally trafficking South Korean videos, or involvement in prostitution, [or] possessing a Bible."

That's right. Possessing a Bible.

Read more at The Christian Post >>


Wednesday, October 9, 2013

No One Wants To Admit That There’s A War On Christians

Even western Christians turn a blind eye to the worst persecution of our times

A displaced young woman prays in the makeshift Catholic chapel in Sudan (CNS)
A displaced young woman prays in the makeshift Catholic chapel in Sudan (CNS)

Back in 1997, American author Paul Marshall said that anti-Christian persecution had been “all but totally ignored by the world at large”. To be sure, the situation has changed in the 16 years since Marshall’s classic work Their Blood Cries Out. A cluster of advocacy groups and relief organisations has emerged, and from time to time anti-Christian persecution has drawn coverage in major news outlets such as the Economist, Newsweek and Commentary. On the whole, however, the war on Christians remains the world’s best-kept secret. As recently as 2011, Italian journalist Francesca Paci – who writes for the Italian media market, which probably pays more attention to Christian topics than almost any other culture on earth, given the massive footprint of the Vatican – said about the fate of persecuted Christians in places such as Iraq, Algeria, and India: “We ignore too many things, and even more indefensibly, we pretend not to see too many things.”

In 2011, the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, addressed the crisis facing Arab Christianity in the Middle East during a conference in London. He bluntly asked: “Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?” Those are questions that deserve answers, and understanding the motives for the silence about the global war on Christians is a good place to begin.

Read more at The Catholic Herald >>


Thursday, October 3, 2013

The War On Christians

The global persecution of Christians is the unreported catastrophe of our time


Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion?

Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.

In recent days, people around the world have been appalled by images of attacks on churches in Pakistan, where 85 people died when two suicide bombers rushed the Anglican All Saints Church in Peshawar, and in Kenya, where an assault on a Catholic church in Wajir left one dead and two injured.

Those atrocities are indeed appalling, but they cannot truly be understood without being seen as small pieces of a much larger narrative. Consider three points about the landscape of anti-Christian persecution today, as shocking as they are generally unknown. According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular observatory based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. Statistically speaking, that makes Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet.

Read more at The Spectator >>


Monday, April 1, 2013

A Christian Catastrophe

Islamist ‘cleansing’ in Mideast

From New York Post
By Ralph Peters 
 
Islamist terrorists and fanatics are methodically exterminating the 2,000-year-old Christian civilization of the Middle East through oppression, threats, appropriations and deadly violence.

Our media ignore the intensifying savagery against Christians in Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt. Unconfirmed reports assert that, last month, Muslim Brothers dragged Christian protesters to a mosque and tortured them — but our reporters won’t look into an Islamist Abu Ghraib.

For a century and a half, the varied strands of Middle East Christianity have faced increasingly fierce pogroms and, for the Armenians, outright genocide. But with the rise of Wahhabi and Salafist terror, the long, slow-motion Holocaust accelerated.

Another attack on Egypt’s 10 million Coptic Christians: Firemen dousing a blaze at a New Year’s car bombing outside a Coptic church.Western liberals romanticize barbaric cultures but have no interest in the destruction — before their averted eyes — of a great and brilliant religious civilization. It’s as if they accept the Islamist creed that Christians don’t belong in the realms of Islam.

But the Middle East was more than just Christianity’s birthplace. The faith we know matured in the Middle East and North Africa, from Ephesus and Antioch to Alexandria and beyond. St. Augustine, the most influential church father after St. Paul, was a North African.

Rome was a latecomer to Christian authority. Through the Middle Ages, substantially more Christians lived east of Constantinople (now Istanbul) than in Europe, the faith’s backwater, whose northern reaches had yet to be evangelized.

Christianity’s greatest thinkers, greatest monuments and greatest triumphs for its first 1,000 years rose in the Middle East. Even the Muslim conquest and relative servitude could not dislodge Christianity. In the worst of times, Christianity turned the other cheek and endured. Some Christians flourished.

Today, the end is in sight.

In Iraq, cities such as Mosul and Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit, were once vital centers of Christianity. But the country’s Christian population, estimated at up to 2 million a decade ago, has fallen by half — perhaps by three-quarters. 

Over 2 million Christians in Syria dread Islamist terror and religious cleansing so much, they lean toward the vicious Assad regime, which at least shielded minorities. Those who can, flee the country.

Christians were early supporters of Arab nationalism. One of the fiercest Palestinian leaders, George Habash, was a Christian, as was the wife of Yasser Arafat. Their thanks? Two-thirds of the West Bank’s and more of Gaza’s Christians have been driven out. They’re now a small minority even in Bethlehem (a situation ignored by our visiting president).

Egypt has the region’s largest remaining Christian population, at least 10 million Copts. With rare exceptions, they’ve long been confined to squalid quarters and treated as third-class citizens. Now the Salafist fanatics have been unleashed. The nation’s Muslim Brotherhood rulers could put a stop to anti-Christian violence, but appear willing to let the Salafists do the dirty work for them. They’re playing bad cop, not-so-bad cop.

And we’ll send the regime at least a billion dollars this year — with no stipulations or conditions except that military-related funds must purchase US-made or US-licensed equipment. With Egypt’s economy in desperate straits and the Brotherhood’s popularity fading, we’re propping up religious-cleansing bigots.

Christians in Iran? Gone. Turkey? Almost gone. Saudi Arabia? The once-thriving Christian and Jewish populations of Mecca and Medina were finished off centuries ago.

And in Lebanon, the only Middle East country that until recently had a Christian majority, Christian rights have been so threatened by Sunni fanaticism that some Christians have reached out to Shia Hezbollah in their desperate hunt for allies. 

Far to the east, in Pakistan, Christians face trumped-up charges of insulting Islam or rape, beatings, murder and church bombings. And we still pour billions into Pakistan.

It’s the end of a world as we know it.

If Islam is a “religion of peace,” it’s time to show the evidence to the endangered Christians of the Middle East.

Of course, not all Christians are angels, nor are all Muslims demons. Most humans of any faith just want to get through the day. And some Christians have collaborated with odious Baathist regimes (usually, to ensure their community’s survival). Nor are most Muslims active supporters of the religious cleansing of Christians from their shared homelands.

But disappointingly few Muslims actively defend religious minorities. It’s not unlike Nazi Germany, where most Germans didn’t want to murder Jews, but were complicit through their silence.

If a Michigan mosque is defaced with graffiti, it makes national news and the Justice Department views it as a hate crime. It’s time for our government and media to apply the same standard abroad on behalf of Christians. 




Thursday, March 28, 2013

Robert Spencer: The Spiritual Journey of Magdi Allam

By Robert Spencer

The highest-profile convert to Roman Catholicism in recent memory, Magdi Cristiano Allam, has left the Catholic Church.

Allam, who was baptized in the Vatican by Pope Benedict XVI on Easter day 2008, explained that what “more than any other factor drove me away from the Church” was the “legitimization of Islam as the true religion of Allah as the one true God, Muhammad as a true prophet, the Koran as a sacred text, and of mosques as places of worship.”

Allam declared that contrary to all that, he was “convinced” that Islam was an “inherently violent ideology,” and that he was “even more convinced that Europe will eventually submit to Islam.”

Perhaps if the Church he joined in 2008 had been more resolute in standing for the defense of Judeo-Christian values and civilization, he would not have such a dark vision of the future. But there’s the rub: the determination to seek accommodation with Islam at all costs, even as Muslims persecute Christians with increasing ferocity all over the globe, is near-universal in the Catholic Church.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

More Than Half A Million Christians Ordered to Leave Sudan

From AllAfrica
 

Sudanese Christians who have barely a month to leave the north
or risk being treated as foreigners are starting to move, but Christian leaders are concerned that the 8 April deadline set by Islamic-majority Sudan is unrealistic.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Persecution Roundup: Bombing in Sudan, Violence in India, Injustice in Saudi Arabia

From The Christian Post
By Luiza Oleszczuk



Mourners carry the coffin of slain Christian Fawzi Rahim, 76, during his funeral Mass at St. George Chaldean Church in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Dec. 31, 2010.  (Photo: AP Images / Khalid Mohammed)
Several reports of persecution against Christians from around the globe have emerged this week, including an update on violence against Christians in Nigeria, the deadly 2010 bombing of an Iraqi church, attacks against Christians in India and a bombing of a missionary Bible college in Sudan.

Kashmir - Muslim leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani spoke out Saturday in support of four Christian missionaries after a Sharia court last week issued a decree seeking their expulsion from the state, Christian Today reported. Despite the support, the missionaries were expelled Friday.

Nigeria – Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, who is the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) in Nigeria, posted a statement on his Facebook page Saturday in which he presumably warns Islamist sect Boko Haram to stop attacking Christians, their homes and churches, or expect to face the consequences. "We are not allowed to burn mosques or kill people of other religious beliefs but [the] Bible says we are allowed [to defend] ourselves/churches/homes," the statement reads.

Nigerian Christians, who have been long targeted by Muslim extremists, especially in the northeast of the country, have reportedly begun to retaliate by occasionally attacking Muslim establishments.

Indonesia – Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday, urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to help stop the intimidation practiced by Muslim extremists, Agence France-Presse reported. About 200 people, mostly members of the Taman Yasmin Indonesian Christian Church, prayed and sang hymns outside the state palace.

China – Five priests from an "underground" church were arrested by Chinese authorities without any explanation Monday during a private meeting in a private house, reported UCA news.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, ChinaAid, a human rights organization, released its annual report on acts of persecution reportedly performed by the Chinese communist government on Christians and churches in mainland China in 2011. Among other disquieting statistics indicating an increase in crackdowns on house churches, the report shows a 131.8 percent increase in the number of Christians detained for their religious beliefs in the country.

Also in China, the trial of a longtime political dissident and baptized Christian, Zhu Yufu, took place Tuesday in China, amid allegations that witnesses were restrained form participating in it. Zhu, 59, has previously served seven years in prison (from 1999 to 2006) for his role in founding the China Democratic Party, according to Human Rights in China (HRIC). The Hangzhou Municipal Intermediate People's Court tried him Tuesday for "inciting subversion of state power," according to HRIC, but failed to hand down a verdict, leaving the disident's future still in question.

Pakistan - A judge Monday denied bail to a young Christian man charged with desecrating a Quran under Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws, despite the lack of evidence, Compass Direct News reported. The 23-year-old was reportedly arrested on Dec. 5 over a shaky allegation from his neighbor that the young man had burned pages of the Quran in order to prepare tea.

Indonesia – An Indonesian church said Monday that one of its members has been unjustly named a suspect by police for allegedly assaulting the local police chief during a melee between authorities and church members in October near Jakarta, reported The Jakarta Globe. The church, which claims numerous acts of persecution from the government, has reportedly had accused the same police chief of using violence to obstruct a religious ceremony.

Sudan - A Bible college in Sudan functioning under Franklin Graham's missionary ministry, Samaritan's Purse, was bombed Wednesday and the ministry alleges the attack was launched by the Sudanese air force, as part of violent clashed between the mostly Islamic government in Khartoum and the mostly Christian, and newly seceded, south.

Algeria - Armed men raided the Protestant Church of Ouargla in eastern Algeria on Wednesday, tearing down the church's gate and damaging the iron crucifix on the church's roof, according to International Christian Concern (ICC). The pastor told ICC that he has been repeatedly threatened and attacked since his ordination in 2007. In the summer of 2009, his wife was beaten and seriously injured by a group of unknown men, and in late 2011, heaps of trash were thrown over the compound walls while an angry mob shouted death threats at the pastor, the minister told the Christian advocacy group. Algerian Christans are often target of attacks from militant Muslims.

Iraq – Three Islamist extremists convicted in the attack on Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad that killed over 50 congregants and wounded more than 60 others in Oct. 2010 were sentenced to death by Iraq's highest court Thursday.

Saudi Arabia - The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a governmental body, called Thursday for the immediate release of 35 Ethiopian Christians who have been detained by Saudi Arabian police since Dec. 15, allegedly for participating in a private religious gathering.

Iran - A report has emerged this week about the Iranian Revolutionary Court sentencing a female Iranian Christian convert to two years in prison earlier this month. The official reasons given by the court were reportedly related to the woman betraying Islam, but media reports have clearly suggested that the conviction is an act of state persecution against a Christian.

India - Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), spoke out against violence against Christians Thursday after the number of attacks increased in late January. Acts of violence against Christians reportedly accelerated after Christmas and New Year's. Among recent incidents was an attack on a Pentecostal clergyman by a group of ultra-nationalist Hindu extremists and a desecration of a monumental Christian cemetery, as reported by Asia News.


Tuesday, February 7, 2012

British MP: Thousands of Christians May Be Killed If Assad Regime Falls

From the Catholic Herald (UK)

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad (AP Photo/Gurinder Osan)

A Catholic MP has said that if the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime falls then thousands of Christians in the country may be killed.