In season of warmth, a look at chilling, global war on Christianity

The aftermath of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians   Source Telegraph/Universal News

From The Rev. John Armstrong, Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, Columbus, Indiana writing in The Republic:


Pope Francis acknowledges it.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, confirms it.

Foreign leaders recognize it.

Human rights advocates, along with more than 80 members of Congress, insist that it is real.

But will the leader of the free world publicly admit it?

“It” refers to the genocide against Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

Genocide involves the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

In addition to outright murder, genocide includes preventing births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Can you say “Boko Haram?”

Recently, Pope Francis said, “Today we are dismayed to see how in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world many of our brothers and sisters are persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith in Jesus.

“In this Third World war, waged piecemeal, which we are now experiencing, a form of genocide is taking place, and it must end.”

Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the United Kingdom says, “What is happening to Christians in (the Middle East) is the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing.”

However, words such as ethnic cleansing and genocide are radioactive to many politicians, because they imply that we have a moral and legal obligation to use whatever means necessary, including military force, to end the atrocities.

Some in the West are slow to acknowledge Christian persecution because they are in the habit of thinking of Christianity as rich, powerful and socially oppressive, and therefore cannot imagine that Christians in many parts of the world are themselves oppressed.

But facts are stubborn things.

From West Africa to Indonesia, from Eritrea to North Korea, Christians are routinely subjected to violence, imprisonment and death, for no other reason than believing in Jesus.

German Prime Minister Angela Merkel declared that Christianity is “the most persecuted religion worldwide.”

According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular organization based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed against Christians.

Between 2006 and 2010, Christians faced some sort of discrimination in 139 countries, almost three-quarters of all countries on earth, according to the Pew Forum.

The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts reports that over the past decade, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed every year.

John Allen, associate editor of The Boston Globe, writes that the global persecution of churchgoers is the unreported catastrophe of our time.

According to Allen, it is “the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.”

When will the world pay attention?

One church leader in the Middle East put it this way: “Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?”

Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.

Pray for our government to use financial and diplomatic pressure against offending countries.

Pray for direct humanitarian assistance by our government and condemnation of these crimes against humanity.

Pray for Christian martyrs to be faithful unto death, and pray for their persecutors to be forgiven and to better understand the faith which they seek to destroy.

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Not in my name

                                                                                                                                                                                                        Source: Independent/PA

"Not in my name". Of course not, but in the name of he who it is claimed "knows best"!

This is the key problem for non-Muslims. Are we 'kafirs' being deliberately misled in the same way that verses, or parts of them, are quoted from the Quran in an attempt to prove that Islam bears no fault.

When gunmen stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali they were heard to shout "Allahu Akbar" as they began their attack, the cry used before animals are slaughtered in the Muslim manner.

Of course these atrocities are condemned by 'moderate' Muslims, especially when they are a minority. They would be mad not to do so. Meanwhile Christianity is being systematically wiped out where it originated in the Middle East with claims that it is "on course" to disappear from Iraq and Syria. I hear no Islamic condemnation.

On 18 November Newsnight considered [advance to 39 minutes] what we know about the Paris attackers, referring to an attack which "the perpetrators call jihad", raising the question of "the nature of religion and those who carry out cold blooded murder in its name". Professor Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, complained that Muslims had been asked to condemn such atrocities for ten years since the 7 July London bombings. It may not have occurred to him but it occurred to me that there has to be a problem with Islam, one that is blindingly obvious to others because it has existed for centuries with Islamic conquests and occupations, using their own laws to justify their actions. Similar concerns are not expressed about Christianity other than harking back to the Crusaders who sought only to protect Christians and their Holy places from invaders.

In response to the Professor's suggestion that the West was somehow complicit for targeting 'Muslim' countries, historian Tim Holland queried why the Yazidis had been targeted. But there was no answer to that because it was all that Newsnight had time for! Clearly not as important as the sporting fixtures which dominate airtime.

The answer to the question of why the Yazidis were targeted is simple. Islam demands that a choice be made when Muslims have control under Sharia. - Become a Muslim, pay the tax or die while women and children are taken into slavery. The plight of the Yazidis had some initial media coverage but that quickly disappeared from the headlines as many of the Yazidi people have from the face of the earth. Not for them the open doors which have allowed Muslims to flood into Europe, including two 'refugees' who have since been identified among the bombers in Paris.

But being a Muslim carries its own risks. In February CP World reported that an ISIL policing unit in Mosul had severely disfigured the faces of 15 Iraqi women by pouring acid on them as a form of punishment after the women were caught without their faces being veiled appropriately, by ISIS standards.

There is no way out. Apostasy carries a death sentence. Those who escape risk being beaten. Nissar Hussain, 49, suffered a shattered knee cap and broken hand when he was attacked with a pickaxe handle outside his home in Bradford.

Lying for the faith is permitted but questioning is not. Outsiders are accused of Islamophobia if they dare to question Islam. Continuing death and destruction should be enough for anyone to raise serious questions even in isolation but when it is on a continuous basis one has to question people's motives.

In Islam Jesus is regarded as a prophet so why are His words ignored? Jesus said: "Everyone who is committed to the truth listens to my voice."

Everyone deserves to know the truth. More honesty would save many.

Postscript [24.11.2015]

British women filmed 'urging young girls to join Islamic State terrorists in Syria'

and from the Jewish Journal:
Why are we abandoning the Christians?

Head in the sand

"Multicultural education is a 'cult of tolerance' in which you demonstrate your
 sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own."

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter - Quran 5:33


Archbishop of Mosul: "I have lost my Diocese to Islam - You in the West will also become the victims of Muslims" (read here).

Coptic Bishop: Without Action, It’s Only a Matter of Time Before Islamic Fundamentalism “Infects the Entire World” (read here and here).

It is not as if the West had not been warned. See here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Need I go on? While the Islamic threat seemed to be someone else's problem it was much more convenient to be able to bury one's head in the sand in the mistaken belief that Islam is a religion of peace rather than confront the fact that cleansing of Christians and other minorities continues around the world where Islam dominates. In the current threat minorities are no longer simply displaced. - It is convert or die! Even young children are being groomed for jihad, recruited to kill Christians other minorities and Shiite Muslims (video here).

For too long apologists for 'the religion of peace' have dismissed Islamic extremists as not representative of Islam but on what evidence? Islam means 'submission' or 'surrender'. If lying is necessary for the sake of Allah, so be it - see understanding Taqiyya - it is part of the faith. Not all Muslims are bad any more than all Christians are good but that should not obscure the reality that when Islamists have the upper hand their attitude to others changes.

As soon as the Prime Minister arrived back from his Summer holiday he was belatedly identifying with the plight of the starving Yazidis who had at the same time been struggling to survive on Mount Sinjar after fleeing the terrors of Islamic State (IS) (here). Mercifully many found their way to relative safety while the rest of the world dithered (BBC pictures here).

Current events so alarmed the Bishop of Leeds that he was prompted to write to Mr Cameron in the following terms: "The focus by both politicians and media on the plight of the Yazidis has been notable and admirable. However, there has been increasing silence about the plight of tens of thousands of Christians who have been displaced, driven from cities and homelands, and who face a bleak future. Despite appalling persecution, they seem to have fallen from consciousness, and I wonder why. Does your government have a coherent response to the plight of these huge numbers of Christians whose plight appears to be less regarded than that of others? Or are we simply reacting to the loudest media voice at any particular time? Full text here.

Mr Cameron was on TV again this morning assuring voters that the current terrorist threat will not cause mayhem on our streets; his priority is to protect British citizens form the IS threat. But IS sympathisers are already here. They have been distributing leaflets in London's Oxford Street while around 500 are thought to have left these shores to fight with the jihadists in Iraq and Syria. In Tower Hamlets the Black flag linked to jihadists Isis has been flown as a sign of solidarity with their brother Muslims, once again demonstrating where loyalties lie.

If, as Mr Cameron says, he wants to keep families safe here in the United Kingdom he needs to address the real issue of the spread of Islam and investigate the contradiction between the so-called religion of peace and use of the sword. He could start here.

The name Muhammad with its variants is again the most popular boys name in Britain adding weight to the conclusion that Islam will be the dominant religion in Great Britain within a generation (here). Unlike Christianity there is no separation of Church and State. Islam is a way of life without borders based on a religious ideology governed by Sharia. It has already taken root here:

"There is not another religion in the world that consistently produces terrorism in the name of God as does Islam.  The most dangerous Muslims are nearly always those who interpret the Quran most transparently.  They are the fundamentalists or purists of the faith, and believe in Muhammad’s mandate to spread Islamic rule by the sword, putting to death those who will not submit.  In the absence of true infidels, they will even turn on each other."

- from The Myths of Islam (here).