Endangered Christians

Where Does This Fit in Iraq?

Mission Network News reports:

Christian Persecution in Iraq is much worse than most people think, according to a report from the Christian Post.

“The situation is more than desperate,” said White, pastor of 1,300-member St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad. White’s firsthand account of the plight of Christians on the ground included a report that 36 members of his own church were kidnapped. Only one has been released so far since the church found enough money to pay his ransom.

White and others also reported that Dora, Iraq has seen many incredibly violent acts against Christians in the last few months. Almost all the churches have been bombed and burned. Almost all Christians have been forced to leave their homes after receiving death threats.

Somehow, this just doesn’t seem right (or even to be expected) in a country “liberated” and “dominated” and “secured” by the United States.

Why is it so?

Shaymaa: In Danger in Egypt

On July 19 I reported on this.

Now Compass Direct News provides us with this sad update:

Egyptian police in Alexandria who last week arrested a Christian convert woman today handed her over to her fanatical Islamist family, who beat her before driving her away.

Eyewitnesses said family members of Shaymaa (Eman) Muhammad al-Sayed, 26, today dragged her screaming from the police station where she had been closeted. According to the eyewitnesses outside Alexandria’s Bab-Sharky police station, Al-Sayed’s relatives severely beat her in the Shatby Cemetery behind the police station at 4 p.m.

She was then forced into a family microbus and driven off toward the district of Abeis, east of Alexandria, where her father’s knitting factory is located.

One week ago, on July 16, these same family members openly threatened to kill Al-Sayed for leaving Islam to become a Christian, after spotting her walking through a fair in Alexandria.

Local police promptly took her into “protective custody,” allegedly to prevent her physical harm at the hands of her irate Muslim relatives.

But instead of protecting her, local police and State Security Investigation (SSI) officials have subjected the threatened woman to days of severe physical and emotional torture. Her maltreatment included electrical shocks, beatings and being photographed naked.

What’s Your Faith Worth?

Marked for Death

A North Korean man will face public execution for the crime of being a Christian if a worldwide effort by an international ministry fails to free him in time.

The Voice of the Martyrs, an organization assisting persecuted Christians around the world, is seeking the release of Son Jong Nam, a former North Korean Army officer turned underground evangelist.

For more than a year, Son has been held in a North Korean death row basement jail in Pyongyang. He has been beaten and sentenced to public execution as an example to the North Korean people.

Threatened Christians Flee The Middle East

He refused to leave Baghdad, even after the day last year when masked Sunni gunmen forced him and eight co-workers to line up against a wall and said, “Say your prayers.” An Assyrian Christian, Rayid Albert closed his eyes and prayed to Jesus as the killers opened fire. He alone survived, shot seven times. But a month ago a note was left at his front door, warning, “You have three choices: change your religion, leave or pay the jeziya”–a tax on Christians levied by ancient Islamic rulers. It was signed “The Islamic Emirate of Iraq,” a Qaeda pseudonym. That was the day Albert decided to get out immediately. He and the other 10 members of his household are now living as refugees in Kurdistan.

Across the lands of the Bible, Christians like Albert and his family are abandoning their homes. According to the World Council of Churches, the region’s Christian population has plunged from 12 million to 2 million in the past 10 years. […] The flight of Christians out of these areas is similar to the hunt for Jews,” says Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-Italian author and expert on Islam, himself a Muslim. “There is no better example of what will happen if this human tragedy in the Arab-Muslim world is allowed to continue.”

Nowhere is the exodus more extreme than in Iraq.

More from Egypt:

Fanatic Islamist relatives of Eman Muhammad el-Sayed, 26, attacked her two days ago while she and her husband were strolling through a local fair in Alexandria. Although police intervened in the street-side fracas, they promptly arrested the victim herself, allegedly to protect her from her Muslim family.

Each day since then, El-Sayed, 26, has been transferred to a security police headquarters in Alexandria, where inside sources confirmed to Compass that she has been subjected to hours of interrogation and severe physical torture.

Good News: Pakistan

Passage of Bill on “Apostates” Called Unlikely:

Christian and government leaders yesterday said they are hopeful that Pakistan’s parliament is unlikely to support the death penalty for Muslims who abandon their faith.

Critics have worried that the Apostasy Act 2006, proposed in May, signaled further reduction of religious freedom in Pakistan, where vigilante enforcement of strict sharia law has been on the rise.

In the most high-profile example of such vigilante activity, burqa-clad members of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid or Red Mosque and religious schools had kidnapped people they accused of being prostitutes and harassed police and music/video-shop owners in recent months. The activities prompted a government siege and raid of the heavily-armed mosque members this week in which at least 102 people died.

The bill likely will not be approved in its original form by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice, where it is being revised, a member of the committee said.

[…]

Proposed by the Mutahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six Islamic parties, the bill states that the testimony of two Muslim male witnesses would be sufficient to sentence to death a male “apostate” or man who changes his religion from Islam. A female “apostate” would receive life imprisonment.

According to article 5 of the draft, a convicted “apostate” would have up to 30 days to revert to Islam and avoid punishment. But repeat male offenders who committed “apostasy” a fourth time would not be given a chance to repent.

[…]

Besides the storming of the Lal Masjid mosque this week, the government is countering extremism in madrassas (Islamic schools) and brooking protests from lawyers across Pakistan over President Pervez Musharraf’s dismissal of the Supreme Court Chief Justice in March.

[…]

At the same time, calm returned to two Pakistani villages where death threats against Christians who refused to convert to Islam have not been carried out.

Christians in the villages of Shanti Nagar and Charsadda had feared for their lives after receiving letters threatening death if they refused to become Muslim in June and May.

Despite rising popular enforcement of strict sharia, the Christians in the two towns have concluded that the unfulfilled ultimatums to convert to Islam in recent months were isolated incidents and not cause for concern over a systematic campaign of violence.

Hopefully this hopeful optimism becomes some sort of good reality.

NK-PRP Underground Railroad

The Underground railroad lives

The story of Pastor Son, who became a Christian while working in China and returned to North Korea to spread his faith, gives us a glimpse into a rarely reported story: the large number of North Koreans who live and work in China, the porous border that allows the smuggling of Kareoke machines and South Korean DVD’s into North Korea, and the smuggling of the thousands of North Korean refugees into China, and the presence of an “underground railroad” composed of Christian believers that is helping to smuggle out some of these refugees.

Many, some estimate 200 to 300 thousand, North Koreans are living in China illegally, knowing that if they are caught they will be deported back to North Korea and placed into prisons where conditions are terrible.

HT: persecution.org

Secret Believers

Here’s a bit of an interesting report from Mission Network News:

Open Doors’ Brother Andrew says now, more than ever, the belief systems of Islam and Christianity are clashing head-on. “The conflict that we face today is a new one. We’ve never, in the history of the world, faced a situation like this where they (Muslims) have unlimited resources, strong belief and eschatology, their right to be heard, not only by the power of persuasion, but by the power of the sword.”

Secret Believers: What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ

The resulting tensions have fueled a great deal of persecution against the indigenous church, especially those who’ve converted from Islam. Their plight is behind Brother Andrew’s most recent book Secret Believers: What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ.

In it, he and coauthor Al Janssen tell the stories of Muslims who encounter Christ and determine to become Christians, despite ostracism and death threats. It also shares the reality faced by Christians struggling to become mature in their faith in the midst of a hostile and increasingly violent Muslim society.

That is born out in the mass exodus of Christians out of the war-torn Middle East. In many of these areas, the conflict has forged a stronger, more determined remnant church, while in others, the fighting has created a “diaspora” effect, resulting in great change.

Take this as a call to prayer for these secret believers.

They’re Not Offering Death?

Insurgents to Christians:

An Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group is giving Christians in Baghdad a stark set of options: Convert to Islam, marry your daughters to our fighters, pay an Islamic tax or leave with only the clothes on your back.

I’m a little surprised “yield your head to Allah” isn’t mentioned as an option.

Perhaps it’s a given.

Everybody knows that, so why state the obvious.

It goes without saying. So it did.

Which option would I choose?

And you?

(Really?)

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Above all, love God!