Endangered Christians | Ain't Complicated

Cell Phone Security

I keep trying to get the point across to people that email and cell phones should not be considered private and secure. I think most think I’m a paranoid kook. Or at least paranoid. Albeit a well-meaning one. Like a kindly old uncle (which I am, which I feel like, which I am) or a gentle befuddled grandpa (which I’m kinda, which I’m not, which I am) 🙄

Well, here’s something new I learned this morning while scanning the newsletter of a mission-related agency:

2) Is Cell Phone Security Even Worse Than We Thought?

Here’s a question from a field worker who writes, “Our mission team is located in a ‘police state.’ We know the police listen to our phone calls regularly. We also know they can use triangulation to locate us. We’re fine with that stuff. 🙂 But now we’re facing a couple of new concerns:

“*** REMOTELY EAVESDROPPING WHEN WE’RE NOT ON THE PHONE — The microphones in cell phones are now being turned on remotely to allow eavesdropping on their owners anytime (even when you’re not making a call). We’ve figured out how to overcome this problem… but we kind of hate to always have the batteries out of our cell phones. 🙂 [By the way, if you think this worker has been watching too many episodes of “24”, just do an Internet search for the term, “FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool.”]

“*** REMOTELY ACCESSING CONTENTS OF YOUR PHONE — We’re hearing (from some pretty tech-smart guys) that it’s easy to remotely hack into the contents of our phone, getting full access to our pics, calendars, docs, task lists, etc. The implications are huge. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Now what?

Orissa Updates

Mission Network News

Four Christian relief workers were beaten, threatened and then arrested in Orissa on Tuesday, November 4. The World Evangelical Alliance says the four were arrested under “forced conversion” charges.

The workers were on their way to the Discipleship Centre which focuses on holistic care, education, health care and similar disaster relief projects when an unknown motorist collided with one of their motorbikes, causing minor injuries to the worker.

A crowd gathered around the scene, quickly turning into a group of 400. The mob beat the DC staff members, threatening to set fire to them at a local cremation centre. Included in the mob were two Hindu groups that had already been protesting against what they perceived to be forced conversions from local Christians.

When police arrived, the workers were arrested for supposedly forcing Christian conversions and causing the motorbike accident. The four are currently in the custody of Orissa police.

Read it all

Persecution Headlines

Before the headlines, a story I meant to post a couple of days ago: 3,000 Christians flee Iraq’s Mosul

Hundreds of terrified Christian families have fled Mosul to escape extremist attacks that have increased despite months of U.S. and Iraqi military operations to secure the northern Iraqi city, political and religious officials said Saturday.

Some 3,000 Christians have fled the city over the past week alone in a “major displacement,” said Duraid Mohammed Kashmoula, the governor of northern Iraq’s Ninevah province. He said most have left for churches, monasteries and the homes of relatives in nearby Christian villages and towns.

“The Christians were subjected to abduction attempts and paid ransom, but now they are subjected to a killing campaign,” Kashmoula said, adding he believed “al-Qaida” elements were to blame and called for a renewed drive to root them out.

Political and religious leaders interviewed said the change in tactics may reflect a desire on the part of extremists to forcibly evict all Christians from Iraq’s third largest city.

Now the headlines:

Now go do the right thing.

Orissa Update

To put the financial crisis in a different perspective:

Christian villages burned, 12,000 people missing from refugee camps

About 12,000 people have disappeared from the refugee camps set up by the government of Orissa to accommodate the Christians fleeing from the violence of Hindu radicals and from their destroyed villages. Meanwhile, a dozen more houses have been burned, while the government of the state assures that it is doing everything possible to maintain security.

Since August 24, a campaign of attacks against Christians and their institutions has been underway in the district of Kandhamal, killing 60 people and forcing 50,000 more to flee. Of these, at least 15,000 have been accommodated in refugee camps overseen by the government. But the Christians do not feel safe; in recent days, attacks have been conducted by Hindu fundamentalist groups against Christians in the camps, with threats and attempts to reconvert them to Hinduism. No Christians from the outside are permitted to enter the camps, and even volunteers and medical personnel from nongovernmental organizations are closely monitored, under the suspicion of wanting to favor conversions to Christianity.

Meanwhile, news of more burned villages is coming from the diocese of Bhubaneshwar. Yesterday, in the village of Balligada, 25 homes belonging to Christians were first ransacked and then set on fire. On October 7 in Phiringia and Sujeli (G. Udayagiri), six homes were attacked and destroyed.

Orissa

First, from the Indian Catholic:

The death toll in the continuing anti-Christian violence in Orissa state rose to 50 as India celebrated the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation and champion of peace.
The latest victim, Lalgi Nayak, a Protestant, succumbed to a gash on his neck and other injuries on Oct. 1. He was injured on Sept. 30, when Hindu extremists attacked his Rudangia village, UCA News reported.

Bibhu Datta Das, a legal consultant for the Church of North India, told UCA News on Oct. 2 that Nayak and others were attacked because they “heroically” resisted demands by Hindu fanatics to denounce their Christian faith.

“Such murders are rampant” in Orissa, said the lawyer representing the unified Protestant Church. He added that perpetrators of the violence that began on Aug. 24 not only burn down houses and churches but “demand that Christians accept Hinduism or face death.”

Sindh Today reports:

The Manmohan Singh government has committed to buy energy worth $70 billion from the ‘dying US nuclear industry’ under the nuclear deal, Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat said here Thursday.

[…]

Karat condemned the continuing violence against Chrisitians in Orissa and serial bomb blasts in Tripura late Wednesday.

‘The Orissa government has failed to control the violence. It is shocking. The Naveen Patnaik government and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders should be held responsible for it,’ he said.

World Sikh News has this:

There was little that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could do to persuade the French President Nicholas Sarkozy on the issue of Sikh turbans as he was under fire with the European Union ticking him off for New Delhi’s failure to prevent massacre of Christians in Orissa and Karnataka. At the India-EU summit, Sarkozy, as head of the European Council, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, took up the issue very strongly about Hindutva terror outfit’s attacks on Christians, leaving Manmohan Singh with little room to push the Sikh demand for removing the ban on turbans in French schools.

But Not of the World

This may be about your fellow believers:

The world’s worst persecutor of Christians in the world is North Korea.
In Saudi Arabia, practicing Christianity can result in death by beheading or stoning.
Over 90% of China’s Christians worship in hidden, underground house churches to avoid government regulations and restrictions.
There is only one Christian church left in the Gaza Strip, and its membership has dwindled to less than 100.
Algeria is about a quarter of the size of Texas, and only 3% of the population are Christians.
There are 69 languages in Iran, and only three of them have a completed Bible. Iran is also the third worst persecutor of Christians in the world.
It is believed there are less than 500 Christians living in the Maldives.
Open preaching in Sudan is punishable by beatings or imprisonment.
Christians make up less than 1.7% of the population in Pakistan, and over 70% of them are the poorest of the poor.
It is estimated that there are 1,100 Christian missionaries living in Turkey.

Source document: OpenDoorsUSA

Grief in Mexico

I know this is nothing new for this part of Mexico, but still….

Death in Chiapas

When the 11-year-old daughter of Antonio Gomez became ill of a stomach ailment, her father decided that it was due to witchcraft committed by his evangelical neighbor.

Gomez, of the Jolitontic community of Chalchihuitan municipality in Chiapas state, gathered seven friends to kill the family of the supposed culprit. After midnight on August 23, they allegedly killed three adults – the parents and their eldest son – and wounded six children with machetes.

Mariano Lopez Perez, public prosecutor of Indian Justice, reportedly said neighbors regarded the father in the attacked family, Pedro Gomez Diaz, as “an evangelical who prayed a great deal.” The neighbors reportedly denied that the family believed in or practiced any kind of witchcraft as far as they knew.

According to Tuxtla Gutierrez-based Cuarto Poder newspaper in Chiapas, all eight of the men who participated in the massacre of three Indians in Jolitontic are now in jail in San Cristobal de las Casas, awaiting justice.

The attackers burst into the hut of the family to kill first the eldest son, Rene, 32. They then slashed the mother, Marcela Hernandez Giron Gomez, and the father, Gomez Diaz.

Before he died Gomez Diaz’s cries alerted the rest of the family, but the murderers managed to seriously wound six other children: Esteban, 4; Ernesto, 6; Anita, 7; Maria, 14; Petrona, 16; and Martin, 18. They were all taken to the public health hospital of San Cristobal de las Casas.