Persecuted and Forgotten 2013 Report – Situation of Christians in in many countries has deteriorated

The cover image of the report shows the destruction of the Virgin Mary Church in Imbaba, Cairo, Egypt, May 2011ACN News ^ | 10/18/2013

In many countries the situation of Christians has sharply deteriorated. This is the finding of the report Persecuted and Forgotten? which was launched at a meeting in the UK Houses of Parliament on 17th October by the UK office of the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN). The report examines the situation of Christians in 30 different countries, including Afghanistan, China, Laos, Pakistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. In particular it analyses the situation in a number of majority Islamic countries and in those states whose political systems have a pronounced authoritarian character. The reporting period covers the past two-and-a-half years.

The principal finding of the report is that in two-thirds of the countries where persecution of Christians is most severe, the problems have become arguably even worse. In fact the Church’s very survival in some parts – notably the Middle East – is now at stake.

For Christians the so-called “Arab spring” has in many cases become what the report calls a “Christian winter”. Although the political upheavals have brought suffering to people of all faith communities, nonetheless it is above all the Christian confessions that have experienced the most open hostility and violence. They have become victims of every kind of political, economic, social and religious conflict – for example the conflicts between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. As a result, a great many Christians have been forced to flee. The report describes the exodus as reaching “almost biblical proportions”.

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The war on Christians – The global persecution of Christians is the unreported catastrophe of our time

5 October 2013- The Spectator

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.

According to the Pew Forum, between 2006 and 2010 Christians faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or de facto, in a staggering total of 139 nations, which is almost three-quarters of all the countries on earth. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed in what the centre calls a ‘situation of witness’ each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians killed somewhere in the world every hour, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for reasons related to their faith.

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Suicide bombers kill dozens at church in Peshawar in Pakistan

Christians mourn next to the coffins of their relatives killed in a suicide attack on a church in Peshawar.24th September 2013 – Reuters/AFP
A pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a 130-year-old Anglican church in Pakistan after the Sunday service, killing at least 78 people in the deadliest attack in recent history on Christians in the predominantly Muslim country.

Explosions struck the historic white-stone All Saints Church in the city of Peshawar, near the frontier tribal areas where Islamist militants have their strongholds, as hundreds of parishioners, many of them women and children, streamed out of the building.

“I heard two explosions. People started to run. Human remains were strewn all over the church,” said one parishioner, who gave only her first name, Margrette.

Her voice breaking with emotion, she said she had not seen her sister since the explosions ripped through the area around the gate of the church enclosure.

Interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said the death toll included 34 women and seven children. More than 100 people were wounded.

“Who are these terrorists, killing women and children?” Mr Nisar said.

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Minister says knowledge of jihad must for children

August 31, 2013 | Shawwal 23, 1434

PESHAWAR: Every child should know about the actual purpose and spirit of jihad as it couldn’t be separated from the faith of Muslims, said Provincial Minister for Information Shah Farman.

“Jihad is part of our faith. Jihad shouldn’t be held responsible for the act of someone, who misuses it for other purposes,” he told a press conference here on Wednesday.

Like other basic principles of Islam, he said, children should have knowledge of jihad.

To a question about reinsertion of Quranic verses regarding jihad in the textbook of Islamic studies for grade 9 and 10, the minister said that a review committee was formed to look into the matter. “No one can dictate the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf-led provincial government to change the curricula,” he said, adding that he had not taken dollars from America.

Mr Farman said that after the passage of 18th Amendment making curricula was a responsibility of the province so it would be developed according to the teachings of Islam and Pakhtun culture. He said that curricula would not be changed to please some elements to help them remain in power.

“According to our oath, we will defend Pakistan and Islamic ideology at all forums. No matter if someone is happy or angry,” he added.

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Pakistani Christians Angered by ‘Sweeper’ Comment

 7/26/2013 World Watch Monitor Staff

Pakistani Christians have been angered by a statement by the chief minister of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that only “non-Muslims will be recruited as sweepers.”

The province, known for short as KPK, borders Afghanistan. Its chief minister, Pervez Khattak, who is in former international cricketer Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), says that he was quoted out of context and misinterpreted.

Khattak denied that he intended anything derogatory. He said he was only responding to minorities’ concerns over access to jobs they have traditionally taken now being denied by applicants who claim that as Muslims they cannot do “unclean” jobs anyway.

Nevertheless, the Christians’ anger (sparked when a local Urdu channel, Capital TV, reported the statement) went viral and has hit national headlines because it highlights long-entrenched discriminatory practices rooted in the Indian subcontinent’s history and still faced by Pakistan’s Christians and low-caste Hindus.

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Pakistan: Violations against Christians Soar

by Mohshin Habib – July 15, 2013

She is on death row for a comment that Jesus Christ is not dead but that the Prophet Mohammed is dead. Pakistan is now one of the most dangerous places for Christians to live.

Rimsha Masih, a young Pakistani Christian girl, who was arrested in August 2012 by Pakistan’s police for alleged blasphemy, has escaped the country with the direct help of Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and AVAAZ, a civic organization. Local media and her parents said she was as young as 11 at the time of her arrest; medical reports classified her as an “uneducated” 14-year-old with a mental age younger than her years. Accused of burning pages of the holy book for Muslims, the Quran, Masih, under Pakistan’s “blasphemy laws,” faced the death penalty.

Masih fled with her family members to Canada, where Immigration Minister Jason Kenney instructed officials to process the family’s applications for permanent residency on humanitarian grounds.

While Masih and her family are fortunate, no one knows what will happen to the rest of the Christians of Pakistan. Even though they make up only about two percent of the population — or precisely because of it: there are so few, they may appear invitingly vulnerable — they suffer beatings by their neighbors, murder by the police and imprisonment by the courts.

Last month, three Christian women, Arshad Bibi, Sajida Bibi and Sauriya Bibi (Bibi means a lady or girl) were brutally beaten and forced to parade naked by the armed henchmen of a landlord, who happens to connections in ruling party PML(N).

According to reports, the incident occurred on the night of June 3, as the male members of the family were at work. The armed men entered the house by jumping the boundary wall, then unlocked the gate from inside. The women, along with two elderly relatives, were asleep. The attackers looked for the men; when they could not find them, they began to beat the three women. They then took the young Christian women into the street, tore off their cloths and forced them to parade naked.

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Ch 7 Today Tonight Ethnic Enclaves / Peaceful Demonstration at Parliament House Steps in Melbourne / More Media Coverage for RUAP

Dear friends & family in Christ, 1) You may click the following link to watch the Today Tonight broadcast of Suburban Enclaves and to read the story from Bryan Seymour…

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Christians are harassed in more countries — 130 — than any other religion in the world

Kirsten Powers – USA Today – April 2, 2013

Christians are harassed in more countries — 130 — than any other religion in the world.

  • Tragically, Christians have been forced to abandon homelands they have occupied for thousands of years.
  • Prosecution of Christians in the Middle East needs more attention.

“Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.” So asserted German Chancellor Angela Merkel late last year, causing a stir. Merkel echoed a concern expressed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who warned in a 2011 speech that Christians face a “particularly wicked program of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing.”

Not ‘War on Christmas’

Now, this is not about clerks who say “Happy Holidays” or bans of nativity scenes in public schools. Merkel spoke of real persecution of hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Indeed, a 2011 Pew Forum study found that Christians are harassed in 130 countries, more than any of the world’s other religions.

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Rimsha Masih’s Unending Nightmare

April 3, 2013 By Frank Crimi – The Point

After being acquitted in January 2013 of blasphemy charges, now reopened the case against Rimsha Masih, a 14-year-old Pakistani Christian girl believed to suffer from mental disabilities.

Rimsha’s case had drawn international attention as well as corresponding outrage after the young girl was arrested  at her home in August 2012 and charged with blasphemy upon being accused by a Muslim neighbor of allegedly burning pages from a Koran.

It should be noted that running afoul of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws can earn sentences of death or life in prison for those convicted of desecrating Islam’s holy book or insulting its Prophet Muhammad.

For her part, Rimsha, who worked as a maid at the time, denied through her attorney any blasphemous wrongdoing, claiming she was simply burning garbage and “did not know a Koranic book was among the papers because she cannot read.”

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London Protest: Christians Persecuted in Pakistan Demand Equality

by Enza Ferreri – 4th March 2013

Saturday 2nd March I attended in London the protest against discrimination and persecution of Pakistani Christians.

Organized by the British Pakistani Christian Association, it included the presentation of a petition both to London’s Pakistani Embassy and to the British Prime Minister’s residence in 10 Downing Street. Several religious figures and human rights campaigners were speakers at the demonstration.

A Peace Rally and Memorial Concert in Trafalgar Square followed, in memory of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Roman Catholic man who was Pakistan’s first Minister for Minorities Affairs from 2008 until Muslim extremists assassinated him in 2011 for his work to abolish the country’s blasphemy law which has been used to persecute faith minorities. He was the only Christian in the government.

Minister Bhatti had received repeated death threats for his consistent defence of the rights of Pakistan’s religious minorities and for his fight for the abolition of Pakistan’s shameful blasphemy laws, which mandate the death sentence for anyone thought to have spoken ill of Muhammad or to have in any way offended Muslim sensitivities: the standard of accepted evidence is very low, and intent or lack of it is not a consideration in passing the sentence.

Two months before the assassination of Bhatti, another man campaigning for the same cause, Provincial Governor Salman Taseer, had been killed by his own bodyguard, who for his crime was welcomed as a hero by many Pakistani Muslims.

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The United Nations Has Been Morally Bankrupt For Decades

FEBRUARY 5, 2013 – Isi Leibler

Israel was the first country to boycott the annual human rights review presented at the bogus United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Despite being tacitly rebuked by the US, Israel was justified in doing so. For years, whilst ignoring the rampant denial of human rights and the butchering of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians throughout the world, the proceedings of this despicably biased body were concentrated on relentlessly condemning, demonizing and delegitimizing the Jewish state.

Recent examples include the defamatory 2009 Goldstone Report – subsequently recanted by Goldstone himself – accusing Israel of willfully engaging in war crimes, despite having a track record of minimizing civilian casualties in war unmatched by any other country. A year later it again condemned Israel for “attacking” Turkish terrorist “humanitarians” on board the Mavi Marmari of the Gaza ”peace” flotilla.

Israel’s decision to boycott the hearings was vindicated on January 31 when, based on largely fabricated Arab and hostile NGO sources, the UNHRC proclaimed that Israel’s settlements over the green line were in breach of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and accused it of indulging in gross “violations of human rights law”. The review made no reference to the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists.

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Human Rights Activist: Many Christians ‘Ignorant’ of Extent of Persecution

By Michael Gryboski , Christian Post Reporter – January 9, 2013

WASHINGTON – A human rights activist with more than 25 years’ experience in ministering to persecuted Christians said Tuesday that many Christians are “ignorant” of the extent of persecution globally.

Dr. Ron Boyd-MacMilan, chief strategy officer for Open Doors International, told The Christian Post that the church in America and elsewhere should spread greater awareness of what is happening to Christians in many parts of the world.

“I think the key thing though is that the church needs to get its story out to the worldwide church better,” said Boyd-MacMilan. “There are still far too many Christians in the world that are either just ignorant or even deliberately so of the true extent of Christian persecution.”

Boyd-MacMilan also told CP that he felt that “we can get out our story better, that there are literally hundreds of millions of Christians in the world who cannot exercise their freedom of worship.”

His remarks came as he was one of two featured speakers at a press conference on Tuesday morning sponsored by Open Doors at the First Amendment Lounge of the National Press Club. There were two major themes of the event: first was the release of Open Doors’ annual “World Watch List” which ranks the countries where persecution of Christians is severest.

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12 Hot Spots for Holy Ghost Revivals

Charisma News – J. Lee Grady- 11/23/2012

The Holy Spirit is working in places you might never expect. The move of God happening in these 12 locations is notable, and these hot spots are great places for evangelists and missionaries to set their sights.

China.  Nothing in the history of missions rivals the success story that is China. Mao Zedong tried to wipe out Christian faith in the 1970s when there were only 2.7 million believers. Today, the most conservative estimate is that China had 75 million believers in 2010. A few years ago the greatest growth was among rural “house churches.” Today Christianity is also growing in China’s major cities, and charismatic renewal has infiltrated state-sponsored churches.

India. Despite language barriers, tribal divisions and violent attacks by Hindus, indigenous church-planting movements have flourished all over India in the last 40 years. Fifteen years ago in Andhra Pradesh, a woman who heard a gospel radio broadcast, asked if someone could plant a church in her remote village. Within the first year after a pastor came, the church had 75 converts. After a church building was constructed in 1994, this church planted 125 churches with a combined membership of more than 5,000. This type of growth is occurring throughout India today.

Iran. Despite crackdowns on church gatherings, arrests of pastors and confiscation of Christian videotapes and other materials, Iranian believers are finding increased openness to the gospel in this stronghold of Shiite Islam. The leader of one indigenous ministry says, “Everyone we share the gospel with wants to become a Christian.” His ministry actually considered limiting outreach until it could obtain more Bibles and train workers to handle the overwhelming response. (more…)

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Christianophobia – A Faith Under Attack

Colorado Springs, December 21 2012 (World Watch Monitor) — By Steve Rabey

Jesus warned his followers that they would experience persecution, a prediction that was already coming true before the books of the New Testament were completed. Today, Shortt argues, “the greatest curbs on religious freedoms take place in Muslim majority countries.”

Take Egypt, where Christianity grew deep roots in the centuries before Mohammed. Today, there are more than 10 million Christians among a population of more than 80 million. But Christians have faced increasing pressures in recent decades, and the overthrow of a dictator and a historic election that promoted the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi have complicated matters even more.

The book documents how attacks and bombings of churches have increased since the election; forced emigration is shrinking the Christian population; Coptic Christians (the largest group of Egyptian Christians) face systematic obstacles to promotion in the army, police and legal professions; Coptic women have been abducted and forced to convert to Islam; and Muslims who convert to Christianity may be shunned, harassed, physically harmed and even killed.

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