Endangered Christians

Rowan Williams, the most senior figure in the Church of England, said that giving Islamic law official status in the UK would help achieve social cohesion because some Muslims did not relate to the British legal system.

[…]

Williams said introducing sharia law would mean Muslims would no longer have to choose between two systems.

“If what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of diverse and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable.”

He compared the situation to faith schools, where “communal loyalties” were brought into direct contact with wider society, leading to mutual questioning and mutual influence towards change, without compromising the “distinctiveness of the essential elements of those communal loyalties”.

Earlier, in a BBC interview, he was more succinct. He said it was a “matter of fact” that sharia law was already being practised in Britain.

“It’s not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system; we already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land … There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with some kinds of aspects of other religious law.”

“Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states: the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women,” he said, according to a Times report.

“But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them,” he said.

Williams claimed Orthodox Jewish courts already are in operation in Britain, and the pro-life views of Catholics and other Christians are “accommodated within the law.”

However, Alistair McBay of the National Secular Society said Rowan’s comments “directly undermine” the concept of citizens being equal under the law.

“We have segregated schools, segregated scout groups and even segregated toilets for Muslims, and now the archbishop says we should have different laws. It’s madness,” he said.

A Pakistani Christian working for the relief and development agency Shelter Now has been murdered in Peshawar.

29-year old Sajeed Williams was on his way home January 17, when a masked man opened fire and killed him. The gunman is at large ; his motives are unknown, as the director of the German Shelter Now branch, Udo Stolte, told the evangelical news agency “idea”.

Williams was married ; the couple has an 18-month old daughter. He was office manager for Shelter Now in Peshawar.

The organization runs two projects in the country – a fish farm and a building project for 105 schools, which were ruined during the earthquake that shook Pakistan in 2005.

The dictator, Isaias Afeworki, justifies his regime’s actions as a requirement until his border dispute with Ethiopia is resolved. No one is impressed by such an irresponsible ploy. Isaias’s core motive is to cling to power by all means possible. The fact remains Eritreans do not need tyranny and mass imprisonment to do what is right in defense of their homeland.

Two thirds of the population needs external food aid, according to the UN. But the regime continues to refuse aid under bogus self-reliance pretexts. The people are daily terrorized, intimidated and starved as a means of controlling them and preempting any popular uprising. The tyrannical regime treats every Eritrean as a potential enemy that must be controlled or liquidated.

Aggression is at its worst once an individual is arrested and imprisoned incommunicado for an indefinite period of time because of his/her political views or faith. Thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of prisoners of conscience are rotting in gruesome conditions in prisons throughout the country.

Many are kept in dungeons and metal shipping containers under smoldering heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. Many die as a result, or become partially or fully paralyzed; one of the victims is the renowned Gospel singer, Helen Berhane. Sanitation is said to be mostly non-existent. There is no medical treatment for injured torture victims.

A FRESH outbreak of Muslim-Christian violence has been reported in Pakistan as the country faces political uncertainty.

Two villages have faced attacks with Muslims using mosques to broadcast calls for attacks on Christians.

The first incident took place in Govind village, near Lahore, according to Christian campaign group Release International. They claim that Muslims there objected to prayers being relayed through loudspeakers at the village church and used rival loudspeakers at seven mosques to broadcast a call to war against Christians

For years, under the leadership of Choi Kwang, a hard-driving missionary from South Korea, North Koreans seeking refuge in China were taken to apartments where they were put through a rigorous training course in Christianity that began daily at 6 a.m. and continued until 10 p.m. The trainees repeated out loud the words of an eight-hour-long tape recording of the New Testament.

Before taking breaks for meals, Choi and the North Koreans would embrace and pray: “Let’s spill Jesus’s blood in North Korea! Let’s become martyrs for North Korea!”

By 2001, when his underground proselytizing network was broken up by the Chinese police, Choi had turned about 70 North Koreans who had come to him in search of food and shelter into missionaries. At least five of them are believed to have been executed in North Korea. At least six others are thought to be in North Korean prison camps.

Major Christian groups in South Korea have raised millions of dollars to deliver food, medicine and clothing to the North and to build or renovate hospitals, schools and churches there. These groups believe that good will builds trust and helps North Korea open up, a strategy favored by President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea.

But many politically conservative Christians in South Korea reject this approach. Instead they dispatch missionaries to northeastern China, where they evangelize among North Korean refugees. They also operate smuggling networks to smuggle North Koreans out, and spread the Gospel into the North via balloons and radio broadcasts.

“You cannot expect North Korea to change from the top,” said Yu Suk Ryul, chairman of Cornerstone Ministries International. “The best way to change North Korea from the bottom is to spread the Gospel.”

Cornerstone supports underground churches in North Korea by way of ethnic Korean-Chinese traders, who supply Christians there with “mini-Bibles” translated into a North Korean dialect, as well as financial assistance and other goods. The group says that it supports more than 1,000 underground cells in North Korea, and that the number is “growing fast,” Yu said.

Cornerstone also releases plastic bags filled with Christian messages and sweets at sea, with the intent that they wash ashore in the North.