OCTOBER 2015 NEWSLETTER
for the NATIONAL CAUCUS FOR THE PERSECUTED CHURCH
Page 1 = Syria.
Page 10 = Iraq.
Page 18 = Making the case for Genocide.
Page 26 = The situation for the IDPs and Refugees in the Region.
Page 35 = Refugee status, asylum and resettlement.
Page 45 = The European migrant/refugee situation.
Page 60 = Iran.
Page 63 = Pakistan and the Paki Christian Diaspora.
Page 74 = Lord Alton - progress in Parliament .
Page 77 = Nigeria.
Page 78 = Tanzania.
Page 80 = Central African Republic.
Page 82 = Ethiopia.
Page 85 = Sudan.
Page 85 = Egypt.
Page 86 = USA.
Page 87 = Ideological and political difficulties.
Page 95 = List of NGOs Aid Agencies and Lobby groups.
SYRIA
ISIS to Execute 180 Assyrian Christians After Negotiations Break
Down
By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter - October 12, 2015
www.christianpost.com/news/isis-execute-180-assyrian-christians-147449/
http://english.ankawa.com/
Militants in northeast Syria are now estimated to have abducted at least 220 Assyrian
Christians 180 of whom were kidnapped in February in mass raids on villages in the Khabur
river valley in Syria. IS, which has been persecuting Christians and other religions minorities
across Iraq and Syria, has released small groups of hostages it kidnapped but is still holding
the vast majority of people it took captive. IS has specifically targeted Assyrians, looking to
drive them out of their millennia-old communities.
ARA News reported on Monday that the terror group is asking for $12 million for the release
of the Assyrians, a sum deemed “unbearable” for the community. “The negotiations, led by
Bishop Ephrem Otnaial, head of the Church of the East in Syria, have been suspended due to
the unbearable demands of the terror group,” revealed Osama Edward, director of the
Assyrian Human Rights Network.
Early in September, hopes emerged that the hostages might be freed, after IS reportedly
agreed to lower its ransom demands. Syrian Catholic Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo
revealed that negotiators had managed to explain to IS forces that asking for 23 million
dollars to free 230 people was an impossible sum, and claimed that IS had decided to ask for
“much, much less,” though he did not share the precise amount. A member of the Civil Peace
Committee in Tel Temir, who chose to remain anonymous, said that “internal rifts” emerged
among Assyrian officials about how to gather the money.
The Islamic State terror group now claims it will be executing 180 Assyrian Christians
after negotiators failed to meet the jihadists’ high asking price to free the hostages.
Last week, IS released a video showing the executions of three of the hostages, which drew
condemnation from persecution watchdog groups, such as A Demand for Action... see below.
“We condemn this latest act of barbarism in the strongest possible terms. The systematic
ethno-religious cleansing of Assyrians/Syriacs/Chaldeans continues. They are helpless. They
are children. They are women. They are somebody’s father and brother,” wrote A Demand
for Action spokesperson Diana Yaqco. “We plea and beg of the international community to
intervene immediately,” Yaqco added. “We have been driven out of our ancestral lands. We
have been killed and crucified. The international community must act now to save lives of
others kidnapped.”
ISIS Execute Three Assyrians in Syria
http://www.aina.org/news/20151008022445.htm
8th October
Three Assyrians were executed by ISIS on September 23. Hasaka, Syria The execution was carried out in the morning of September 23 - the day Muslims
commemorate the "Festival of the Sacrifice" (eid al-Adha). It is not known why ISIS waited
two weeks to release the video.
The three Assyrians, wearing orange jumpsuits and kneeling, were killed by gunshots to the
back of their heads. They were identified as Dr. Audisho Enwiya and Ashur Abraham from
the village of Tel Jazira, and Basam Michael from the village of Tel Shamiram.
The three Assyrians were part of the group of 253 Assyrian that were abducted by ISIS on
February 23, when it overran the 35 Assyrian villages on the Khabur river in the Hasaka
province. ISIS subsequently released 48 of the hostages. With the death of these three, the
number of Khabur Assyrians being held by ISIS is now 202.
On August 7 ISIS captured the town of Qaryatain and captured 250 Assyrians. It
subsequently released 15 of them.
In the video ISIS said that if ransom for the remaining Assyrians is not paid, they would be
executed as well. ISIS has demanded $50,000 for each hostage, totalling over 10 million
dollars.
The video first shows three Assyrians, each of whom states his name and his village. These
three are executed. The video then shows three other Assyrians on their knees behind the
bodies of the three dead Assyrians. The three Assyrians state their name and village and one
says "Our fate is the same as these [pointing at the 3 dead Assyrians lying in front of him] if
you do not take proper procedure for our release."
Here are the statements of all six Assyrians:
First group:
1. I am Assyrian Christian Ashur Abraham from the village of Tel Tamar, Jazira
2. I am Assyrian Christian Basam Essa Michael born in 1976 from the village of Tel
Shamiram, Tel Tamar
3. I am Assyrian Christian Abdulmasih Enwiya born in 1997 from the village of Jazira
district of Tel Tamar.
Second group:
1. I am Assyrian Christian Zaya George Elia, born in 1988 from the village of Shameran
District of Tel Tamar.
2. I am Assyrian Christian William Youhana Melham District of Tel Tamar, village of
Tel Shameran born in 1964.
3. I am Assyrian Christian Marden Tamraz Tamraz born in 1966 village of Tel Jazira.
We are here and there are dozens of us. Our fate is the same as these [pointing at the 3
dead Assyrians lying in front of him] if you do not take proper procedure for our
release, we realize the inevitable fate.
In a separate incident on the same day, a father and his twelve-year-old son were among
twelve Syrian converts from Islam to Christianity who were captured on 7 August, then
publicly slaughtered by beheading or crucifixion after they refused to renounce their faith
in Jesus.
The 41-year-old father, his son (just two months away from celebrating his 13th
birthday), and two other men were forced to stand before a crowd as IS militants
ordered the believers to renounce Christianity and return to Islam. When they said they
would never deny Christ, the militants took the young boy and in front of his father and
the others, they beat him and cut off his fingertips. The jihadists promised to stop if his
father converted back to Islam. He refused, and all four were beaten, tortured and
crucified until dead.
The militants put signs beside them that read “infidels”. “They were left on their crosses
for two days,” said Christian Aid Mission. “No one was allowed to remove them.”
ISIS militants, on the same day, publicly raped two Christian women, ages 29 and 33, in
front of a crowd summoned by the jihadis, and then beheaded them, along with six men,
when they refused to convert to Islam.
"Villagers said some were praying in the name of Jesus, others said some were praying the
Lord's prayer, and others said some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to Jesus,"
the ministry director, who had baptized some of the victims, said. According to the witnesses,
"One of the women looked up and seemed to be almost smiling as she said, 'Jesus!'" Their
bodies were then crucified. http://www.aina.org/news/20151009200930.htm
Assyrian Christian Family: Our Longtime Muslim Friends and
Neighbors Killed Our Children
By Raymond Ibrahim 10th October
http://www.raymondibrahim.com
The 6-minute video is a must-see = http://www.aina.org/news/20151009151504.htm
It offers an up close and personal account of what Christian minorities are experiencing at the
hands of jihadis and other Muslim "rebels" being supported in the Mideast by the Obama
administration.
A Christian family from Iraq narrates how their young children were killed and burned
alive, "simply for wearing the cross." One of the remaining and traumatized children uses
toy figures to show people how his siblings were slaughtered.
Listen especially to the mother's words starting around the 2:50 minute mark. She talks
about how the "ISIS" that attacked and killed her children were their own Muslim
neighbours, whom they ate with, laughed with, and even provided educational and
medical service to.
This family is identical to the other Christian refugees who fled the Islamic State in Iraq and
came to America--only to be imprisoned and then thrown back to the lions by the Obama
government.
Christians in Syria Struggle to Survive As Persecution, Terror
Attacks Increase
http://www.gospelherald.com
Posted 2015-10-04 18:47 GMT
His 6-year-old daughter still wakes up screaming, more than three years after the sounds and
sights of war first gave her night terrors. At least a few times each week, she wakes up with her
muscles clenched, her head thrown back and her mouth open, screaming. Her father, a pastor
in western Syria, had already taken his family and fled to another city in Syria after her terrors
began, only to find that the war followed them there. Now they live in the quiet - for now - city
of Sweida, but the night terrors still come. "Doctors told us this is just from the fear," he said.
"We rely on the Lord."
The pastor, whose name is withheld for security reasons, and his family typify the many
Christians scrambling to survive in Syria. With an estimated 700,000 of Syria's pre-war
population of 1.4 million Christians having already fled, he too harbors the question, "Should
I flee my country, and if so, when and where should I go?"
In a country where the Islamic State (IS) is carving out a caliphate with atrocities committed
against those who don't swear allegiance to it, it is a high-stakes question. In an unnamed
village outside Aleppo, according to Christian Aid Mission, which assists indigenous Christian
workers in their native countries, Islamic State militants on Aug. 28 crucified four
Christians, including a 12-year-old boy, and beheaded eight others in separate executions.
The boy was the son of a Syrian ministry team leader who had planted nine churches.
"In front of the team leader and relatives in the crowd, the Islamic extremists cut off the
fingertips of the boy and severely beat him, telling his father they would stop the torture
only if he, the father, returned to Islam," Christian Aid reported. "When the team leader
refused, relatives said, the ISIS militants also tortured and beat him and the two other
ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their deaths in crucifixion."
They were killed for refusing to return to Islam after embracing Christianity, as were the other
eight aid workers, including two women, according to Christian Aid. The eight were taken to
a separate site in the village and asked if they would return to Islam. After refusing to
renounce Christ, the women, ages 29 and 33, were raped before the crowd summoned to
watch, and then all eight were beheaded. They prayed as they knelt before the Islamic State
militants, according to the ministry leader Christian Aid assists, who spoke with relatives and
villagers while visiting the site.
"Villagers said some were praying in the name of Jesus, others said some were praying the
Lord's Prayer, and others said some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to Jesus,"
the ministry director told Christian Aid. "One of the women looked up and seemed to be almost
smiling as she said, 'Jesus!'"
Their bodies were hung on crosses for display after they were killed, he added.
All Syrians are suffering in the war, but Christians are exposed to greater risks because of their
outsider status within Syria, according to human rights activists. Even before war broke in
2011, the country was divided into numerous ethno-religious factions. Sunni Muslims, Shia
Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Kurds all vied with each other and with the Alawites, a sect
of Shia Islam of which President Bashar al-Assad is a member.
Almost all the sects have long-standing hostilities toward the Christians, but that aggression
was held at bay in the name of public order for decades by the ruling Assad family. When
myriad armed factions rose up against Assad, the Christians lost their protector and had to
navigate old prejudices alone.
Ever-shifting alliances among groups intent on securing a beneficial position added to
Christians' problems. Militia groups, including the nascent Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,
now known as the Islamic State, attacked church buildings and Christians along with their
property.
This new reality became evident soon after the pastor in Sweida moved back to his hometown
of Kharaba; an Islamic militia group attacked Christians, threw them out of their homes and
replaced them with 500 Muslim families.
"My family in Kharaba faced some attacks, and my house in Kharaba was taken by Jabhat alNusra," he said. "They took the keys from me. All of us, my uncles' families, my family, my
sister's family and my brother's family faced attacks in our home village, Kharaba, which was
at one time 100 percent Christian."
After the attacks, 85 percent of the Christians fled Kharaba. Only 70 Christian families
remained, and they are dominated by the militia and the Muslims they brought into the village.
Even now, the pastor said, no one is allowed to open the church building in the town, ring its
bell or hold worship services there.
The pastor, who continued leading a church group in Daraa, was also leading another church
group in Kharaba. After eight months in Kharaba, he was asked to temporarily lead an
additional church in Sweida. The pastor of that church told him he would return in five months.
"I kept doing that for a month, but the situation in Kharaba got worse, and I had to take my
family and move to Sweida," the pastor said. "The five months are finished, and now two and
half years later, the pastor still hasn't returned. He is not coming back and told me that later."
The pastor moved to Sweida with his wife and three children, the youngest a toddler and the
oldest in ninth grade. His traumatized middle daughter improved after they moved, but then he
was faced with the hardships of living in a city isolated by war. The city is over-crowded. There
are shortages of basic supplies, especially medical supplies, food and water. When staple items
are available, they are extremely expensive. Finding a place to live is a problem. There are
rolling blackouts, little gas for cars and scarce heating oil for homes.
In Sweida, about 25 miles north of Syria's border with Jordan, most residents are Druze, who
believe in a gnostic blend of several philosophies and religions. There is a small minority of
Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox and Muslim Bedouins.
The Druze initially thought the Assad regime would protect them, but among them are elements
both for and against Assad, and most recently they have formed armed groups under
government eye to protect their land. They are willing to defend against attack from any party,
but they don't have sufficient weaponry.
Most of the militia groups around Sweida are from Jabhat al-Nusra, the Free Syrian Army or
individual gangs from Bedouin tribes. IS hasn't come to Sweida yet, but there have been reports
of IS troops fighting in the province of Sweida, further filling the city with refugees. The pastor
said that Sweida will be a target of the Islamic State: The militants consider the Druze loyal to
the government, so IS will target them, especially as they are non-Muslims. Also, Druze
women wear modern fashions, and the Druze generally are well educated and open to ideas
that are anathema to Muslim extremists.
"We have some displaced people who fled from ISIS," he said. "There are a lot of examples,
but I can't give names. We have some that were kidnapped, and others whose homes were taken
from them. We have a family from Damascus who have no idea what happened to their home
and farm and are living in a difficult situation."
The pastor said that he doesn't think there will be an attack to overrun the city anytime soon,
but there have been car bombings.
"The general situation in Sweida is safe and OK, though there have been some individual cases
such as kidnapping or individual crimes, but they have to do with the overall situation of the
country," he said. "For example, the last incident was a month and half ago, when a Catholic
priest and a friend of mine named Tony al-Botros, was kidnapped and released about 10 or 15
days ago. He was kidnapped for about a month, and then a ransom was paid and that's why he
was released."
When the civil war originated in 2011 out of a series of protests, Syrians waited, assuming that
the conflict would be over in months. But as it became evident that the parties were in a
stalemate and the brutality of the fighting increased exponentially, people started fleeing. When
IS took over wide swaths of territory, a wave of refugees fled the country. More than 4 million
of Syria's pre-war population of 22.5 million people are estimated to have left.
First the rich left, and then the middle class. Now the people fleeing Syria are the most
desperate, the destitute and the chronically ill. Faced with all the hardships, the pastor also has
considered leaving. Because he carries the burden of ministering to three church groups in three
different cities, though, he feels the weight of responsibility and won't leave them.
But if God opened a door to leave and arrangements were made to keep the ministries running,
he would likely leave, he said.
"In the past two months, because of all the difficulties we were going through, we have been
thinking if there is a chance to leave Syria, we will," he said. "The situation now doesn't show
any hope but hints to getting worse in the future in Sweida."
ISIS Beheading Christians At 'School of Death' Where Girls Are
Sold As Sex Slaves
By Stoyan Zaimov -Christian Post - 10th October
http://www.aina.org/news/20151010150638.htm
Christian refugees who have managed to flee the Islamic State terror group in Syria have
revealed in a testimony video that the jihadists are trafficking captured men and children
to a so-called "school of death" where they carry out beheadings and sell young girls at a
slave market.
"When we were in Syria they put us in a school, and it was called the school of death, they
used it to behead all the men there. We all the knew that the men will be beheaded and the girls
will be sold in the slave market," one girl says in a video captured by the media team of In
Defense of Christians.
"There are whole families that lost all their children," adds one of the men.
See video here - http://www.aina.org/news/20151010150638.htm
A boy describes the IS terrorists as "beasts," and says that "they didn't leave us anything in this
country."
The Christians in the video plead: "Please help us and save our people that are kidnapped by
ISIS."
The video is part of an effort by IDC to raise awareness for Concurrent Resolution 75,
which seeks to declare IS' actions in Iraq and Syria against Christians and other religions
minorities a Genocide.
"Christians and other ethnic and religious minorities have been murdered, subjugated, forced
to emigrate and suffered grievous bodily and psychological harm, including sexual
enslavement and abuse, inflicted in a deliberate and calculated manner in violation of the laws
of their respective nations, the laws of war, laws and treaties forbidding crimes against
humanity, and the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide, signed at Paris on December 9, 1948," the Resolution reads in part.
It calls on the U.S. government to acknowledge the extent of the atrocities that are being
carried out with the specific intent of eradicating entire communities.
The terror group has captured significant territory across Iraq and Syria, where it has
established its Islamic Caliphate. It has become infamous for its beheading videos, forced
conversions, and human slavery practices that have forced thousands of women and children
into sex slavery. Christian leaders from the region have warned that the refugee crisis has
reached "biblical proportions."
Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan said that Western countries need to step up and
save Christians from the hands of the jihadists. "We are begging the West to stand for the rights
of all citizens in Iraq and Syria," the spiritual leader of the world's 158,000 Syriac Catholics
said last month. "The situation is very devastating and tragic. For Iraq, this has been happening
for two generations. For Syria, the war has been taking place for the last three years, with no
hope on the horizon for Christians in the area."
IRAQ
Ed: Iraq is sliding towards disintegration. Military personnel are deserting, the
Government is weak, ISIS cells - and Shia militias - are operating in Baghdad, and
Christians who have fled to the city for safety are being targetted.
I have this in today from a Christian in Baghdad via Facebook who witnessed the
assassination of this Christian man... Saad Sliwa Mansour Naamat. Another life, another
family, another martyr.
Saad Sliwa Mansour Naamat
Christianity Faces Extinction in Iraq Within Five Years:
Report
By Conor Gaffey - 14th October
http://europe.newsweek.com
Christianity could be extinct in Iraq within five years, according to a new report backed
by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. The report, which looks at the persecution of
Christian groups around the world and was compiled by U.K. charity Aid to the Church in
Need, was presented to the House of Lords on Tuesday. In comments reported by the
Catholic Herald, Cameron backed the report and deplored the fact that "Christians are
systematically discriminated against, exploited and even driven from their homes" every
day in some countries.
The report highlights the plight of Christians in Iraq, where political instability since the 2003
war and persecution by ISIS has reduced the population to around 260,000, from a peak of
about 1.4 million during the rule of Saddam Hussein. It references an exodus from Iraq of
Christians fearing ethnic-cleansing and potential genocide and warns that "Christianity is on
course to disappear from Iraq within possibly five years -- unless emergency help is provided
on a massively increased scale at an international level."
In June 2014, ISIS took control of Iraq's second city of Mosul, and members of the city's
Christian population were told to convert, pay a special tax or be put to death, according to the
report. Thousands fled to the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, but ISIS overran the area in
August last year and forced around 125,000 Christians to flee. Some 100,000 Christians
reportedly sought refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in northwest Iraq that is
governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government, with many living in tents in Christian
suburbs.
Aziz Emmanuel al-Zebari, a Chaldean Catholic and professor at Salahaddin University in Irbil,
the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, says that persecution from ISIS is not the only reason many
of his fellow Christians are leaving the country. Al-Zebari tells Newsweek: "To be a
Christian in Iraq, you have no future. There is no security...The economic situation, with
no salaries, no job opportunities, no educational opportunities, people are just waiting for
nothing so they decide to leave the country."
Iraqi Christians have looked abroad for assistance in their plight. Bashar Warda, the Chaldean
Catholic archbishop of Irbil, addressed the House of Lords in February and pleaded for the
U.K. to send troops to Iraq to prevent the Christian population from being wiped out. The U.K.
is presently conducting air strikes in Iraq as part of a U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS, but has
not committed any ground troops to the operation.
A 4,000-strong Christian militia called the Nineveh Plains Protection Units was formed in Iraq
earlier this year in a bid to protect the communities from further destruction at the hands of
ISIS.
Al-Zebari says the urgent priority must be the establishment of a safe haven for Christians
displaced from the Nineveh Plains, while he also raises concerns that ISIS sleeper cells could
strike Christians in Kurdistan at any time. "There are 500 members of ISIS who come from
Kurdistan," Al-Zabari says. "They are Kurdish people and they have joined ISIS, which means
that there are sleeping cells here inside the province and once they have an opportunity, they
would create havoc here."
Douglas Bazi, a Chaldean Catholic priest assisting Christians displaced from Mosul and the
Nineveh Plains at the Mar Elias Church in Ainkawa, says that Christians have been
persecuted in Iraq for many years and are losing their sense of belonging to the country.
"I'm in love with my country, I'm in love with my church there but believe me, my country is
not proud [that] I am part of it," Bazi says.
Hundreds of Christian refugee families are living in cramped conditions in caravans
around Bazi's church. Bazi himself was kidnapped by Islamist militia in 2006 and suffered a
broken back at the hands of his captors.
According to al-Zebari, the extinction of Christianity in Iraq would have a dramatic impact on
the country's wider society. "For Christianity to disappear from the Middle East and Iraq would
be the end of enlightenment and tolerance and democratic values and human values, because
although we are a minority we have left our fingerprint in every aspect of life here," al-Zebari
says.
Knights of Columbus Raise Millions to Assist Christians of Iraq
By Joyce Coronel - Angelus News - 15th October
http://www.angelusnews.com
Father Douglas Bazi has suffered for his Christian faith in ways most Americans can't fathom.
A native of Iraq, the Chaldean Catholic priest has been shot at, kidnapped and tortured. "One
day, I believe they will kill me," Father Bazi says.
Now, he's working alongside the Knights of Columbus to raise awareness about the plight of
Christians in his homeland. During the month of September, the Knights sponsored a 60-second
commercial to call attention to the ongoing struggle of Iraq's Christians, driven from their
ancestral homes by ISIS during the summer of 2014. About 100,000 have been living in refugee
camps ever since.
Father Bazi is helping to lead the exiled Christian community and was featured in the
commercial, asking viewers to "save my people."
And while most people refer to the displaced Christians as refugees living in camps, Father
Bazi prefers not to think in those terms. In the appeal, he refers to centers. "I call it a center
because camp is a negative word," Father Bazi told The Tidings. "And I never call them
refugees. I call them relatives."
The Mar Elia center where Father Bazi lives is currently hosting 110 families. The families
were living in tents for many months but are now in steel caravans, or small manufactured
structures. The caravans offer a bit more protection, but each family is squeezed into a space
that measures 10 feet by 20 feet. "If they are seven or five or two people, it's just for one family.
Of course there are no restrooms. We use the public one that is beside the center," Father Bazi
said.
When asked what message he would like the world to know about the crisis facing his people,
Father Bazi boils it down to three words: pray, help and save.
"First, I ask for prayers for us, because with faith, we can survive. It makes us so that we cannot
give up suddenly," Father Bazi said. "When our heart has faith, we can help and deal with this
situation."
In the midst of so much difficulty, he is forging ahead, baptizing babies, celebrating Mass,
training catechists and directing a school for 388 students. After school hours, he returns to
Mar Elia Church until 8 or 9 p.m.
Still, more than a year has passed since the Christians were pushed from their homes and many
wonder what the future holds for them. They long to be reunited with loved ones, many
of whom have scattered around the globe over the last decade. The younger women say
they would be afraid to ever return to their homes, worried that they too could be
captured by ISIS and sold as sex slaves.
"People here, they are dying by sorrow. That's why I say, please save us," Father Bazi
said. "Among my people, no one blames God for what happened. They blame man."
The Knights of Columbus was one of the first organizations to commit to helping the Christians
of Iraq when the ISIS onslaught began. The new effort, launched Sept. 3, financed the delivery
of one month's supply of food to more than 13,500 displaced families from Mosul and Nineveh
who fled to the Erbil area in Kurdistan.
The food assistance is part of the Knights' multi-million dollar initiative to help the persecuted
Christian and other religious minorities of the Middle East. The latest effort will bring the
Knights of Columbus' assistance in the Middle East to more than $4 million overall, with $2
million having been raised since the end of July, according to the Knights.
Each one-month food package typically contains staples such as tins of fish and meat, as well
as rice, sugar, cooking oil, tomato sauce, beans, cheese, wheat and pasta. The $60 per package
cost includes transportation and packaging, for a total cost of $810,000.
Mark Arabo, a San Diego businessman, is an advocate on behalf of the Christians of Iraq.
Active in the Chaldean Catholic community, he's traveled the country and has spoken at more
than 100 churches and organizations, trying to get people to recognize the dire situation of
Iraq's beleaguered Christian community. "It's a genocide. People are being targeted and
killed just because they're Christians. It's heartbreaking," Arabo said.
He's also visited Congress and the White House, but admits it hasn't done much good.
"You would think that if you go to Congress or White House or the president and said
there is a genocide happening in real time and these are the victims who are being killed
... you would think we would do what we did in Bosnia, but we're not. The government is
failing. We can't put humanity in the hands of our government," Arabo said. The support of the
Knights of Columbus for the region's Christians, Arabo said, is "amazing" and deeply
appreciated.
"God bless them and give them the clarity and the strength to carry the mission forward," Arabo
said. "We need as much awareness of the plight of Christians in the Middle East as
possible. Christianity is on life support in the Middle East -- it's under attack and the
frontlines are here in America."
Local Pastor’s Son Filming Documentary about Syrian Refugees
Doreen Dennis -SurfKY News Reporter - October 9, 2015
http://english.ankawa.com/?p=15827#more-15827
A local pastor’s son is filming a documentary in Kurdistan this month about an ordained
minister’s passion for helping thousands of Syrian refugees. Jett Wilson, son of Pastor Pat
Wilson at Life Christian Center in Madisonville, will focus on the plight of the refugees and
U.S. missionary Grady Pickett’s relief efforts in “The Refugee Film.”
Wilson, producer of Exile Alley Films, and Pickett were in Madisonville recently to speak
about the refugee relief ministry in Kurdistan. Madisonville Police Chief Wade Williams,
who served in the U.S. Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom, will also be featured in the
documentary.
The filmmaker believes the missionaries and volunteers are an under-told story that
needs to be documented. “Hundreds are working in camps and keeping refugees alive,”
Wilson said, noting he wants to bring awareness through his filmmaking talents.
“They don’t have small aspirations,” he said, noting the refugees want to work and make a
good life for their families. “We are raising money ($30,000 plus) for the film and the bread
ministry. A large portion will go to relief efforts, while much of the work is volunteer.”
Pickett’s ministry near the Kurdistan capital of Erbil in northern Iraq includes providing 700
loaves of bread per day in a refugee camp of 4,000 people.
“There’s 700 families there, so each family
gets a loaf every day,” Pickett said. “It’s one of their staple foods over there.”
Pickett and his wife, Becky, and six children have made Kurdistan their home for
nearly six years. His journey began 11 years ago after backpacking around the world,
learning Arabic and finding his calling in northern Iraq.
He said some 35 million Kurds live in the region and are essentially “without a country.”
Pickett’s bread ministry’s cost of $2,000 per month is met through churches, friends
and donations from around the world, he said. The former Special Forces Marine also
helps provides blankets, builds cradles for babies, and most recently, provides military
training for a new Christian Army.
After ISIS attacked Mosul, Pickett said his refugee camp took in several displaced Christians
from that region.
Last year, Pickett said his camp experienced a frightening close call, when ISIS drew near.
“ISIS tried to attack, but they were pushed back,” he said. “We were the only (volunteers)
who stayed. “ISIS was coming down the highway, before someone got on the phone with
Obama, and he let loose with airplanes and started bombing.”
Wilson said he understands the scope of the worldwide refugee problem of 65 million people
that began in Egypt four years ago involving the Arabic Spring. He explained the crisis stems
from the Syrian civil war and several rebel army factions that also include Islamic extremists
fighting for a pure Islamic country under ancient principles.
Wilson also noted the Kurds want their independence and that would take away most of
Turkey’s southern region. Kurds also inhabit regions in Iran, Iraq and Syria.
“No one wants to see an independent Kurdistan,” he said. “It’s all about oil revenue and no
one wants that oil revenue going to the Kurds.”
The filmmaker said ISIS wants to take over the world.
“In the meantime, these people are on the ground running,” Wilson said.
Wilson hopes the film will be picked up by networks to help bring greater awareness to the
refugee crisis.
Life Christian Center, a non-denominational church in Madisonville, has been supporting
Pickett’s efforts in northern Iraq by raising funds through food fundraisers.
Williams, a church leader and former Army lieutenant who served in Mosul during Iraqi
Freedom, said Pickett shows great courage for the work he does in Iraq. “It’s one thing to go
to war, but to go take your family is whole other level,” Williams said of Pickett. “They’re
holding their own; and, until he feels otherwise, they’re going to stay and continue their
work.”
Williams said the church is making monthly pledges to Pickett’s bread ministry and the
documentary. Williams will be featured in the film talking about his experience in Mosul and
the importance of the region’s stability.
Wilson hopes “The Refugee Film” will be released early next year.
The ministry is accepting donations at gofundme.com, Picketts in Iraq. Donations may
also be made at Life Christian Center, 721 Princeton Road, Madisonville.
GENOCIDE
Ed: it is very important that the UN recognise that a Genocide is taking place towards the
Christians Yazidis and other religious minorities in the Middle East. The UN was
originally established to prevent and combat genocide but there has been a marked
reluctance to do so in respect of the Middle East - very probably because of political
pressures and because recognising Genocide would oblige the UN to actually do
something.
Recognising Genocide would greatly assist the cause of the Christians Yazidis and other
minorities in getting appropriate Aid support and also refugee/asylum/resettlement status;
at present they are being repeatedly overlooked as the UN (and the EU) hide behind
definitions that discount IDPs (internally displaced persons) as refugees and which refuse
to identify people by religio-ethnicity .
The policy of 'not discriminating in favour of any particular religious group' has been a
most effective cover for discriminating against religious groups who have been repeatedly
ignored in the UN and International Aid and Shelter provision, the generous UK/DFID
Aid provision, coverage by the mainstream media, political debate, and - now - the
selection of the 'most vulnerable' for resettlement under the US, UK, and other national
asylum programmes. Efforts to redress the imbalance (e.g. Australia) in favour of
Christians have been met with howls of protest from religious leaders all anxious to
demonstrate their PC credibility.
But Genocide by any definition is occurring and the World is choosing to look away...
Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when
accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify
a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations
of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The
objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social
institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence
of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity,
and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
The preamble to the Genocide Convention ("CPPCG") notes that instances of genocide have
taken place throughout history, but it was not until Lemkin coined the term and the
prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the United Nations
defined the crime of genocide under international law in the Genocide Convention.
The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into
effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)). It contains an internationally recognized
definition of genocide which has been incorporated into the national criminal legislation of
many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Article II of the Convention
defines genocide as:
...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
UN Security Council Resolution 1674, adopted by the United Nations Security Council on 28
April 2006, "reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit
Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war
crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity".[23] The resolution committed the
Council to action to protect civilians in armed conflict.[24]
In 2008 the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1820, which noted that "rape and other
forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive
act with respect to genocide".
ISIS and Religious Genocide in the Mideast
By Nina Shea - National Review Online - 10th October
Nina Shea is the director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom.
http://www.aina.org/news/20151009200930.htm
The Islamist genocide -- and there can be no doubt that it is genocide, despite world
silence -- of the Christians, Yazidis, Mandeans, and other defenseless ethno-religious
minorities of Syria and Iraq continues. The killing of these peoples is deliberate and
brutal and is rooted in religious hatred of the "infidel." It is meted out in sudden violent
executions, mass deportations, and the gradual, methodical destruction of their
civilizations.
Washington is blind to this genocide that occurs alongside, but is separate from, a
sectarian Muslim power struggle. It has failed to defend them militarily. Now it is failing
to provide humanitarian help in the only manner left: resettling the survivors out of
harm's way, in countries where they will be able to rebuild their families and preserve
their unique ancient cultures without fear. Rescue is the very minimum we can do to help
these victims of genocide.
Yesterday, we learned that three Christians captured from Assyrian villages in Syria last
February were executed by ISIS on September 23 in a desert area, somewhere in the
"Caliphate," and that possibly hundreds of other murders will follow. After the jihadist'
demands for $10 million in ransom money were not met, the three Christian men were
murdered with a single shot to the back of each head as they were lined up, on their knees,
garbed in orange jumpsuits. In its video of this execution, ISIS threatens to kill the 202
remaining Christian hostages from the February raid. It is probably not a coincidence that
September 23 was the Muslim commemoration of the "Feast of Sacrifice" (Eid al-Adha).
In the video, which was broadcast on Lebanese television on Wednesday, each victim first
identifies himself as an Assyrian Christian, and then states his name, year of birth, and home
village: "I am Assyrian Christian Ashur Abraham, from the village of Tel Tamar, Jazira." "I
am Assyrian Christian Basam Essa Michael, born in 1976, from the village of Tel Shamiram,
Tel Tamar." "I am Assyrian Christian Abdulmasih Enwiya, born in 1997, from the village of
Jazira district of Tel Tamar." Three militants in black masks then appear behind the kneeling
Christians and raise their guns to administer the point-blank shots. The Christians tumble
forward, dead.
The video next shows three other Christian men on their knees behind the bodies of the three
just killed. The new group of prisoners repeat the pattern, first stating their ethnic and religious
identities and then their names and home villages. "I am Assyrian Christian Zaya George Elia,
born in 1988, from the village of Shameran District of Tel Tamar." "I am Assyrian Christian
William Youhana Melham District of Tel Tamar, village of Tel Shameran, born in 1964." "I
am Assyrian Christian Marden Tamraz Tamraz, born in 1966, village of Tel Jazira." The last
to speak points to the three bodies before them and states, "We are here and there are dozens
of us. Our fate is the same as these. If you do not take proper procedure for our release, we
realize the inevitable fate."
These victims were from the string of 35 Assyrian Christian villages along the strategic
Khabour river valley in Hassake. ISIS militants, in a convoy of 40 pickup trucks, ISIS's
trademark vehicles, captured this undefended area between its strongholds of Raqqa and Mosul
after being flushed out of nearby Kobani last winter. Kobani was a highly touted Coalition
victory against ISIS. Perhaps the doctoring of military assessments at CentCom explains why
less is said about the linked strategic failure in the Khabour river valley. No American airstrikes
against the offensive there were made until after the villages had been taken and over 200 of
their residents kidnapped, and then only after a campaign was launched by Christian activists.
On October 1, the grim details emerged of twelve other Christians murdered, this time
explicitly for refusing to renounce their faith in Jesus Christ. Christian Aid Mission of
Charlottesville, Va., received eyewitness reports from relatives of the victims that, outside
Aleppo on August 28, ISIS militants crucified a twelve-year old Christian boy and his
Syrian missionary father, along with two other men with the ministry. "All were badly
brutalized and then crucified," the Protestant ministry director said. The boy had his
fingertips cut off, in an attempt to force his father to convert to Islam. Their bodies were
left hanging on the crosses for two days, under signs reading "infidels."
In a separate incident on the same day, ISIS militants publicly raped two Christian
women, ages 29 and 33, in front of a crowd summoned by the jihadis, and then beheaded
them, along with six men, when they refused to convert to Islam. "Villagers said some
were praying in the name of Jesus, others said some were praying the Lord's prayer, and
others said some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to Jesus," the
ministry director, who had baptized some of the victims, said. According to the witnesses,
"One of the women looked up and seemed to be almost smiling as she said, 'Jesus!'" Their
bodies were then crucified.
Meanwhile, over 2,000 Yazidi women and girls remain sexually enslaved by ISIS, and
some are now pregnant, while others have been forced to undergo abortions. Several reports
have already described the horrors they suffer. In a new development, a young women who
escaped, with the pseudonym Bazi, recently told CNN of her enslavement and repeated rapes
by an American jihadi with ISIS. Said to be a former teacher in the United States, he now goes
by the name of Abu Abdullah Al Amriki.
Bazi, who visited Washington to testify before Congress, related: "Before raping me, he would
pray for like fifteen minutes or half an hour. And after that, even if it was 2 a.m., 3 a.m., after
raping me, he would go take a shower and pray again."
Also visiting Washington this week is Iraqi parliamentarian Vian Dakhil, whose emotional
speech in August 2014 about the ISIS onslaught against her Yazidi people riveted world
attention and prompted President Obama to order airstrikes to help the Yazidis besieged on
Sinjar mountain. She told Politico of a ghastly incident in which a mother was unknowingly
fed her own son to eat, and of more rapes and abuses.
Dakhil says the Yazidis feel abandoned by Washington and the world. Iraqi Christian
and Mandean representatives have recently said the same to me. Many of these peoples
are desperate to leave the region. They do not want to leave to seek economic
opportunities, or even to escape the wartime deprivations, but to save their lives and the
lives of their children. They are not being targeted because they are political dissidents or
bear arms in conflict. They are targeted solely for religious reasons.
This is genocide and we are morally and legally bound to help them. A military resolution
to this crisis will be too late for these peoples. Catholic priest Father Douglas Bazi, the director
of the renowned Mar Elias refugee encampment for Iraqi Christians in Erbil, tells me: "Help
us live. Help us leave." They need visas. The West can easily provide them, and it must.
Isis Guilty of 'Cultural Cleansing' Across Syria and Iraq:
UNESCO Chief speaks out
By Alexander Sehmer - The Independent - 5th October
Isis and other militant groups are guilty of "cultural cleansing" in the Middle East, the
head of the UN's heritage organisation has said. Irina Bokova, the director general of
Unesco, said the world had been "stunned" by the scale of the destruction of historically
and culturally significant sites by Islamist terror groups over the past few years.
She noted that the recent attacks in Syria carried out by Isis, also known as Islamic State, were
similar to the destruction of manuscripts by Islamist fighters in Mali in 2013 and the Taliban's
dynamiting of the Buddah statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
"I'm calling this cultural cleansing," she said, emphasising that destroying heritage sites
should be seen as an attempt to erase cultural identity.
In an interview with Russia Today's World's Apart programme, Ms Bokoba decried the
"systematic destruction" of important historical sites, "combined [with] industrial scale
illicit archeological sites, looting of archeological sites and trafficking".
Isis has carried out a sustained campaign of destroying cultural artefacts.
Its destruction of parts of Palmyra in Syria, a Unesco World Heritage site, prompted
international outrage, but the looting and trafficking of antiques also helps fund the group's
operations.
"For the first time we have convinced the UN Security Council to take up seriously
something that we have been advocating since the beginning of the Syrian conflict," Ms
Bokova said in her interview. "I remember during those times I was criticised in the press,
[which said] that Unesco is out of touch because people are dying and we are talking about
bricks and stones," she said.
In August Isis fighters destroyed three tower tombs in Palmyra, structures that had survived
since between 44 and 103 AD.
The Temple of Bel, an iconic religious building that had survived for 2,000 years, has also been
destroyed.
ISIS Terrorists Forced Pregnant Yazidi Women to Have
Abortion Before Selling Them as Sex Slaves

Anugrah Kumar - October 12, 2015

http://english.ankawa.com/
http://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-pregnant-yazidi-women-abortion-sex-slaves-

A refugee woman from the minority
Yazidi sect, who fled the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, sits with a child inside a tent at
Nowruz refugee camp in Qamishli, northeastern Syria Aug. 17, 2014.
Proclaiming a caliphate straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State militants have swept
across northern Iraq, pushing back Kurdish regional forces and driving tens of thousands of
Christians and members of the Yazidi religious minority from their homes.
Young Yazidi women, who were captured by ISIS terrorists in Iraq and found to be already
pregnant, were forced to undergo unsafe abortions by the terror group’s gynecologists before
being sold as sex slaves, according to three Yazidis who managed to escape their evil captors.
Three young Yazidis, who now live in the refugee camps of Dohuk in Iraq, told their tragic
stories to CNN, even as hundreds of other abducted women and girls remain in the clutches
of the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “One of my friends was
pregnant. Her child was about three months in the womb. They took her into another room.
There were two doctors and they did the abortion,” a 21-year-old Yazidi woman was quoted
as saying. “Afterwards, they brought her back. I asked her what happened and how they did
it. She said the doctors told her not to speak,” she said, adding that abortions were done by
ISIS’ own gynecologists and it left her friend bleeding heavily. “She could not talk or walk.
She was the first. After that, they took the pregnant women and put them in a separate
house,” she said.
Girls and women would be lined up for “inspection,” a 16-year-old girl recalled, saying her
“belly, teeth, breasts” were examined by ISIS men.
A 22-year-old woman said the man who took her as his “wife” showed her a letter, days after
taking her, which said that a captured woman will become Muslim if 10 ISIS fighters rape
her. The ISIS man then raped her, and gave her to his friends. “I was passed on to 11 others.”
Yazidi women and girls were abducted from Iraq’s Sinjar province last August. Many of
them were later sold, given as gifts, or bartered for weapons. Some of them committed
suicide, while a few others made unsuccessful attempts.
The Yazidi minority is one of IS's main targets, along with Christians.
There are about 600,000 Yazidis in Iraq, who consider themselves to be Kurds ethnically and
live mostly in north-central Ninevah province and northeastern Iraqi Kurdistan.
An all-female police force of ISIS recently released a manifesto which was laced with
references to the Islamic scriptures, encouraging girls as young as 9 to marry Jihadis and
asking women to remain “hidden and veiled” and serve their “masters".
“It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be
married by sixteen or seventeen, while they are still young and active,” it said.(Ed: see Quran
65.1 and Maududi commentary, vol. 5, p620, and two Hadiths). In its English propaganda
publication, ISIS earlier sought to justify its barbarity, saying it is “Islamic” to capture and
forcibly make “infidel” women sexual slaves.
“Before Shaytan [Satan] reveals his doubts to the weak-minded and weak hearted, one should
remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as
concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia that if one were to deny or mock, he
would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur’an and the narration of the Prophet …
and thereby apostatizing from Islam,” stated the ISIS’ glossy propaganda magazine “Dabiq,”
named after a site in Muslim apocalypse mythology.
Why Don't Our Leaders Care? ISIS Threatens to Execute 250
Assyrian Christians
By Rev'd Johnnie Moore - Fox News - 10th October
http://www.aina.org/news/20151010150210.htm
A few days ago ISIS executed three Assyrian Christians, and I bet you haven't heard a
thing about it. This is because the world is becoming increasingly numb to a drastic
escalation in the persecution of Christians -- and other religious minorities -- all over
North Africa and the Middle East.
Christian pastors are unjustly imprisoned in the Sudan and in Iran, Christian converts have been
executed by Islamic extremists in more than a dozen countries, hundreds of churches and
Christian homes have been burned across Africa and in the United States college students in
Oregon were allegedly targeted for their profession of faith in Jesus Christ by Christopher
Harper-Mercer.
In the recently released ISIS execution video, the three Assyrians are predictably crouched in
orange jumpsuits as they are forced to state their name and their Christian faith before they are
shot in the back of the head. Before their execution they were literally forced to say "I am a
Christian." They were killed for their faith, yet there remains a prevailing sense of denial in
Washington that Christians are particularly threatened. In fact, there has been dismal -- if
not, zero -- attempts by the United States government to provide special treatment to Syrian
and Iraqi Christians who are endangered by the threat of total extinction.
As opposed to joining with the voices of international leaders - like Pope Francis -- in
calling this a Christian "genocide," our president has again and again avoided even
referencing the particular threat being endured by these ancient Christian communities,
if not denying it.
Let's be frank: the United States has a Democratic administration and a Republican Congress
that doesn't appear to care about a Christian genocide unfolding across the world. And time is
running short. Every act of terror that is met by indifference fuels the resolve of those who
believe they can wipe out Christian communities without retaliation.
These three Assyrian martyrs were among the 250 Assyrian Christians ISIS kidnapped from
villages along the Khabur River last February. Now, ISIS is threatening to kill all of them if a
ransom isn't paid. They should never have been able to get them in the first place.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to play halfhearted war games with innocent lives in
the crossfire. All of this, on our watch and in our generation. Historians will lament our
indifference.
THE SITUATION FOR THE IDPS AND REFUGEES IN KRG
AND ELSEWHERE
Islamists Bring Terror to Refugee Camps
By Ruth Kramer - 13th October
https://www.mnnonline.org
http://www.aina.org/news/20151013033401.htm
Syrian militants are among refugees fleeing to other countries, and they don't leave their
Islamic extremist practices behind. They have brought brutality and a culture of fear into
some refugee camps, said the director of a ministry in the Middle East supported by
Christian Aid Mission.
In United Nations camps in Jordan, Islamist gangs bring the same practices that refugees
have fled: coercion to join terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS), conflict
between militias on both sides of the civil war and the criminal buying and selling of
females as sex slaves.
"The Muslim gangs come as refugees, but they have their agendas," said the ministry director,
whose name is withheld for security reasons. "They're like a mafia. People are even killed
inside the camps, and the refugees are afraid to say if they saw somebody get killed. If you
ask them, they'll say, 'I don't know, I was asleep.'"
Formed in 1990 to bring the gospel to Arabs in several countries in the Middle East, the
ministry began providing food parcels, medicines and other aid to refugees from Syria in
Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon after civil war broke out in Syria in 2011. It also provides aid to
displaced people within Syria.
Only 20% of the Syrian refugees in Jordan are living in refugee camps, he said, and the ministry
has found a larger harvest of souls among Syrians outside the camps; most in Jordan have
managed to find apartments subsidized by aid organizations.
U.N. refugee camps offer little refuge, he said. "The last time I went inside a camp, I had a
policeman with me," the ministry director said. "The camps are dangerous because they have
ISIS, Iraqi militias, and Syrian militias. It's another place for gangs. They're killing inside the
camps, and they're buying and selling ladies and even girls."
Inside the camps, ISIS treats the men much as they do in Syria--telling them that they
will either swear allegiance to the caliphate or be killed, he said. ISIS militants try to do in
secret what they did openly in Syria.
In territory claimed by the ISIS caliphate in Syria, he said, the militants call all the men of an
occupied town or village to the town center. "If you're a man and you stay home when they
call, you're killed," the director said. "So you go out and they tell you the rules: Why they're
there, and how they're going to give you a chance to be a real Muslim, because they say they
know how to make real Muslims."
If someone consents to join the caliphate, but the militants sense that his heart is not really
with them, they will also kill him for that, he added. Likewise, if they call out the men and
they realize that someone knows his neighbor is hiding but doesn't turn him in, the one
who doesn't reveal his neighbors' whereabouts will be beheaded, he said.
"No one could flee from their hands," he said. "They don't ask you. They bring you to the
middle of town and they gather everyone--this happens almost every day--and they say, 'He
hid his neighbor and he knew about it,' and they cut his head off in front of everyone."
In Jordan, ISIS members--whether coerced or voluntary--and other Syrian militants may be
found outside the refugee camps, but they are less able to impose their reign of terror on society
as a whole. Signs of the ISIS presence outside the camps are more subtle.
"Many refugee women have husbands who are with ISIS in Syria," the director said. "We
find these poor women with expensive iPads, so how did they get them? Their husbands
who are in ISIS are sending money to them. We still want to reach them for Christ, of course."
Reaching any Middle Eastern Muslim, much less one associated with ISIS, with the gospel is
a delicate, gradual process, and the ministry's 32 full-time workers and 400 volunteers
throughout the region are trained to initiate relationships, answer doubts, share the good news
of Christ's salvation and develop disciples.
One member of ISIS from northern Syria came to visit his relatives who had fled to Jordan
because he had heard Christians were providing them aid, the director said. He intended to kill
the Christian workers providing aid to his relatives, who were not living in a refugee camp.
After hearing the gospel and witnessing the love of the Christians, he put his trust in Christ.
"He first saw how Islam brainwashed him about Christianity, and how that contrasted with the
reality of what he saw in the Christians," the director said. "And we're talking about an area of
Jordan that has three Salafist [a strict, fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam] mosques. They
raise up people to go and fight."
The former Muslim extremist militant was so enthusiastic in sharing his faith with the Salifis
that he quickly put himself in danger, he said.
"He even got threats from them, and that's when I began trying to calm him down, because
otherwise they may kill him," the director said. "They may take him and create a big threat
among the refugees. We need to work very quietly and slowly."
Showing the love of Christ is the starting point for gospel outreach, and that is how the ministry
has undertaken its vision of fulfilling Christ's commission to make disciples of the unreached.
Founded originally to reach Arabs by Arabs, it has expanded its vision to reach Bedouins,
Gypsies, Druze, Kurds and Alawites.
"We have had to follow some clever methods that outweigh the intelligence of any of us," he
said. "We certainly know that God is behind these methods. We have witnessed the fruit and
many great experiences throughout these years that made us realize that God is the one leading
us."
War With Isis: Why Syria's Christians Can Never Go Home
By Patrick Cockburn -The Independent - 10th October
http://www.aina.org/news/20151010185446.htm
Christians forced out of Hasakeh, north-east Syria, are too fearful to return. Syrian
Christians are too terrified of past kidnappings and present suicide bombings by Isis to return
to their homes in towns and villages from which the Islamist militants have driven them. Much
the same is true of other communities in Syria, meaning that few of the 4 million Syrian
refugees now outside the country and the 7 million within it are ever likely to go home.
Isis has adopted a strategy of ensuring that even where it is defeated and forced to retreat,
it can ensure that there is a state of terror and permanent insecurity in the territory from
which it has withdrawn. One can see the results of this process clearly in the town of Tal
Tamir and nearby villages on the Khabur river in north-east Syria, where there were once large
Assyrian Christian populations and which were seized by Isis at the start of the year. These
places were recaptured by the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) in the early
summer but they remain desolate and uninhabited.
It has been months since there was any fighting in Tal Tamir, and it is undamaged compared
to many Syrian cities, but it has become a ghost town with empty streets, boarded up houses
and overgrown bushes in gardens. We had been directed in Qamishli, the largest city in this
Kurdish-controlled part of Syria, to seek out the local Christian militia and, with some
difficulty, we found their headquarters in an abandoned villa.
"I was told you were coming, but not to tell you anything," said the local Christian commander.
But there probably was not much to tell, since there were only a few militiamen, mostly without
weapons, in the villa which had no furniture aside from a rusty metal table and some chairs.
He pointed us vaguely in the direction of another militia headquarters that turned out to be
closed. The Kurdish YPG likes to give the impression that it has non-Kurdish allies, but in
practice does not tolerate independent militias.
In searching for elusive Christian militiamen, we met Jan Abraham, an Assyrian Christian and
the mayor of a small village called Tal Maghas, where he says that "out of 50 families which
fled my village in February when Isis advanced only three of them have returned. In Tal Tamir
itself, there used to be between 15,000 and 20,000 people, but today this is down to about
1,000." He says that the Christians have mostly sought sanctuary in Lebanon, Turkey, Germany
and Sweden.
Mr Abraham, a cheery confident man aged 54, still has a job in the Agricultural Bank in Tal
Tamir, though most of his customers have left. He says that he advises people to come back,
but "they are too afraid of Daesh [Isis]." And they have reason to fear since their villages have
been largely destroyed.
Syrians often begin conversations by saying their neighbourhood is safe and only gradually
confess that this security has its limitations. Mr Abraham was no exception and, after 10
minutes, he revealed that a woman suicide bomber from Isis had been detected the previous
week in Tal Tamir trying to enter a market, though she had been detained before she could
blow herself up. She had been wearing traditional long Arab robes and pretending to be
pregnant to conceal the explosives around her waist. Local people were suspicious of her
because they thought she did not walk like a pregnant woman, but the non-Kurdish militiamen
were all male and could not search her. This did not apply to the YPG fighters, many of whom
are women, who searched the suspect and prevented her detonating her bomb.
Isis is pursuing the same tactics across Kurdish-controlled north Syria where the Islamist
militants have suffered their most serious military defeats this year at the hands of YPG ground
forces backed by intense United States bombing. The YPG broke Isis's long siege of Kobani in
January, though 70 per cent of the city was pulverised by US bombs and missiles, and the
Kurdish fighters have since advanced to the Euphrates. Isis lost an important border crossing
with Turkey at Tal Abyad in June and failed in an attempt to seize Hasaka city. Yet the front
line between Isis and the YPG is long and porous, so it is impossible to defend against
infiltrators. Pervasive fear that Isis has "sleeper cells" in every Sunni Arab community
stokes paranoid suspicions and deepens hostility between Arab and Kurd.
North-east Syria is probably the safest part of the country, apart from the cities of the
Mediterranean coast, but among the remaining Christians there is a feeling that the region
has become too dangerous to live in. Mr Abraham says that he is advising people to return,
but he admits that he himself "is waiting for a job contract in Germany or Sweden". His son is
an electrician in Germany and his wife and daughters are in Lebanon, though conditions are so
bad there that they might return to Syria at least temporarily.
Many Christians in Tal Tamir have been displaced several times. Isho Jamo, a 48-year-old
unemployed electrician, originally comes from a village called al-Kharita outside Hasaka city,
which in 2012 was entered by insurgents "who claimed to be the Free Syrian Army but turned
out to be Ansar al-Sharia [an Islamist rebel faction] who stole everything in our homes." Mr
Jamo fled to Hasaka and then to Tal Tamir and would like to go back to his village "but it has
been destroyed".
We asked if this was the end of the Assyrian Christian community, and Mr Jamo said he
believed not, but did not look very convinced by his own words. He was speaking outside a
fine looking Christian church called al-Khadissa that was opened by the church warden called
Jan Jacoub, who owns a small shop opposite the church. Mr Jacoub lamented that "the
congregation of our church was between 700 and 800 on Sunday, and people would overflow
into the street, but today only 100 people come to services".
Back in Qamishli, the main city of the region, Daoud Daoud, an Assyrian leader, confirmed
that most of his community would never return to Syria. Most Christians in Syria are
deemed to be supporters of President Bashar al-Assad, but Mr Daoud said that the leader of his
group, Gabriel Gawriya, had been arrested by the government in 2013 and was in a prison
outside Damascus.
The Kurds say the corner of Syria they control is secular and all sectarian and ethnic groups
can live there, but even so the insecurity is so great that normal life has become impossible.
Even where there has been little destruction, the fear and sense of threat is so high that few
refugees or displaced people can go home.
Roundtable Discusses Model for Protection of Minority Rights in
Kurdistan
By Arina Moradi - Rudaw - 10th October
http://www.aina.org/news/20151009215350.htm
Arbel, Iraq -- Practical ways of protecting minority rights in Kurdistan were discussed at a
roundtable hosted by the Erbil-based Middle East Research Institute (MERI) on Thursday.
"Our aim is to bring stability into Kurdistan. That would not be possible without a
mechanism to protect individual and human rights. Our research is a step towards
rebuilding the state," said MERI president Prof. Dlawar Ala'Aldeen. He emphasized that the
protection of minority rights would be a win-win situation for all people living in
Kurdistan, regardless of their ethnic and religious backgrounds. MERI has proposed its
own model for protecting minority rights in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Kurdistan
region. Its research has shown that can be achieved through the creation of two parliamentary
councils, one for religious minorities and another for ethnic groups.
MERI's findings are presented in a report titled "Protecting Minorities' Rights in the
Kurdistan Region: A Tailor-made Model."
Ed: MERI is an Erbil-based non-profit organization that established in 2014 and is focused on
policy issues and the system of governance in Kurdistan and Iraq as well as in the rest of the
Middle East.
"A council for ethnic minorities will represent Turkmen, Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Armenians," the report recommends, adding that the second council for religious minorities
would protect the rights of "Yezidis, Christians, Kaka'is, Zoroastrians, Mandaneans and
Baha'is." The MERI roundtable was attended by some 40 participants, representing civil
society, human rights and minority activists, as well as law experts, members of parliament and
representatives of major ethnic and religious minority groups.
Ala'Aldeen said that the current participation of 11 lawmakers from minority groups in the
Kurdistan parliament was inadequate and limited.
The major minority groups, including Yezidis, Christians and Turkmens have
representatives in the Kurdish parliament. But based on reports, their participation has
brought very limited improvements to their communities, since there is no authority to
enforce policies related to minority issues.
"The rights of minorities have not been received seriously in the Kurdistan parliament,"
said Aydin Maruf Selim, an MP of the Turkmen faction.
Shabaks, Kakais, and Jews are among minority groups that so far have no representatives
in the Kurdistan parliament. "Unfortunately, we as Shabaks have no representative in the
Kurdistan parliament. We want our fellow minorities in parliament not to forget Shabaks when
working for minority rights," Hussein Ali Shabak, who represented that Shabak community at
the MERI meeting, told Rudaw.
Krmanj Othman, lawyer and advisor to the Kurdistan Region's Independent Human Rights
Commission, said he believed that the councils suggested by MERI would be more effective if
an article mentioning them was added to the Kurdish constitution.
Some attendees complained that a lack of political will, cooperation among minority
groups and the community's mentality on minority rights are the biggest challenges in
the process of improving coexistence in Kurdistan.
Lebanon's Christians in Danger of Being Overrun, Losing Access
to Politics
By Gregory Tomlin
http://www.christianexaminer.com
Posted 2015-09-29 05:43 GMT
Lebanon's Christians are being overrun by Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq and are in
danger of losing their place in their country, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil told
members of the Lebanese expat community in Connecticut during a visit this weekend.
"What is happening in Lebanon is an attempt to replace the people with Syrians and
Palestinians," Bassil said, according to the Lebanese Daily Star.
Because Lebanon's Christian population is, and has historically been, a minority, Bassil said
their rights are being threatened because "some are attempting to impose Muslims over
Christians." He said that attempt will likely result in "consequences."
Lebanon has, in the past, been sharply divided along religious lines. A 15-year civil war
between Muslim militias, the Shiite Hezbollah terror group, and Christian factions left the
country in ruin for the final decades of the 20th century. Many Christians fled the country
during the civil war from 1975-1990.
In the United States for the 70th meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, Bassil said his country
could not absorb the number of refugees flowing into the country. Lebanon, he said, currently
is housing 2 million refugees, of which three-fourths are Syrian. The remainder are Palestinian.
Bassil said he said he still believes Lebanon can have a future because Muslims and Christians
were "destined" to live beside one another in peace. The only thing that stands in the way, he
said, are the terrorists flowing in with the refugees. "Immigration results in terrorism and vice
versa," he said.
"We in Lebanon are on the front lines of this battle and cannot make this confrontation if you
don't support us," Bassil told the expat community. He also said it was their duty to help
preserve the peaceful form of Islam that has traditionally been practiced in Lebanon.
"It is our responsibility as Lebanese Christians, especially in light of ISIS' advances, to defend
true Islam," Bassil said.
Bassil's comments follow an extensive interview with the Middle East's Al-Monitor, in which
he said the Christian community in the region, as a whole, has basically eroded "in large
chunks."
"In Iraq, it happened over 20 years, and we saw that 90 percent of the Christians have left Iraq.
In Syria, we don't have actual numbers because of the chaos. We cannot tell. We know that
there has been a lot of internal and external immigration and displacement. Can we talk of
figures and percentages? No. But definitely churches have been destroyed and people have left
already," Bassil told Al-Monitor.
Lebanon may be facing a similar exodus of Christians if the pressure on them becomes too
great. And the pressure is both internal, as well as external, he said.
"It's the same crisis of Daesh [the Islamic State]. It is not an exaggeration by saying this. You
can see it in different means, such as in Lebanese politics where the diversity has been
eliminated and it is not accepted to have the real representative of the Christians in a political
position," Bassil said.
"This is similar to what Daesh is doing in the region by eliminating the non-uniform elements.
In Lebanon, we should have the diversity of all communities sharing the power through a real
partnership, real power sharing. It's not happening now where the elements of the minorities
are being gradually eliminated by not allowing them to ascend to power. There is a refusal to
allow the real representatives of the minorities to gain power, comparable to an ideology of
political extremism," he said.
Bassil holds the United States partly responsible for the problem because, he said, the United
States armed militant Islamic factions in Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the nation's longserving dictator.
In a speech to the American Middle East Christians Congress in Detroit, Mich., in 2012, Bassil
said, "Christians in the Middle East are disturbed and confounded by the U.S. support of
extremist movements which does not only threaten the very existence of Christianity in the
Middle East, but is also causing harm to the US citizens and US interests all over the world."
Bassil said in the speech he was fighting for a country in which "the right to be different" should
be proclaimed as an essential element of democracy, opposite the culture of Islamic extremists
based on the idea of the "elimination of the other."
"The decline of this role has only increased intolerance, extremism and denial of these rights.
Some parties in the region have publicly declared democracy as 'a one way transportation
vehicle,' and pledged stepping out of it once they reach their destination: power. That is the
main motto for the Arab Spring; this is their means to achieve 'Justice and Development.' But,
once reached, killing will be their means to eliminate their opponent, [or] the opponents of the
Caliphate."
Bassil said the Lebanese people should see Christians not as "remnants of the Crusaders," but
as descendants of the original Christian inhabitants of the land -- those baptized by the apostles
of Jesus Christ.
The same is true with Muslims, he said. He hopes the Lebanese will see peaceful Muslims as
"people of jurisprudence and culture, mutual tolerance and understanding."
For some, that might be a naive vision of what Christians in the country can expect should ISIS
gain a foothold there. But the threat posed by ISIS could also result in temporary alliances -for now -- between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon.
It has already happened on a smaller scaler.
In June, Hezbollah -- aided by a Christian militia -- repelled an ISIS attack along the border of
Syria and Lebanon. And in April, a report surfaced of Catholics working alongside Hezbollah
to defend Lebanese villages from ISIS fighters only two-and-a-half miles from their village.
"At the first sign of an intrusion," the report said, the "newly formed Christian militia has been
instructed to contact the army post at the foot of the mountain, and then take positions around
the town, alongside an unlikely ally: Hezbollah fighters. The members of the Shiite militia,
which the European Union and the U.S. both consider a terrorist group, are concerned about
the Sunni jihadis from Syria enough to make common cause with Christians. In fact, the
Christians of Ras Baalbek and the Iran-backed militants are downright friendly to each other.
In Lebanon's complex quilt of sects and allegiances, they are pioneering a new approach:
Christians and Shiites together, against the Sunni extremists."
qq
REFUGEE STATUS, ASYLUM AND RESETTLEMENT
Why Do We Not Save Christians?
By Elliott Abrams 3rd October
http://www.weeklystandard.com
The Yom Kippur liturgy, just followed in synagogues around the world, repeats several
times references to God as one who rescues captives. The central daily Jewish prayer as
well refers to God who "supports the fallen, heals the sick, sets captives free." And
throughout Jewish history, the redemption of captives has been considered an important
commandment.
This is the background to the repeated decisions by the state of Israel to free a hundred
or a thousand Arab prisoners in exchange for one single captive Jew. It is also the
background to Israel's actions to rescue the entire Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish
communities by bringing them to Israel.
The rescue of threatened Jewish communities has been a central public purpose of Jews living
in safety. American Jews pressed their government to push back against repression in Morocco
in the 19th century and in Czarist Russia in the early 20th. They failed to get the doors open
for many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, but they tried -- despite rampant antisemitism,
not least in the State Department. They succeeded in opening the doors of Soviet Russia,
whence a million Jews fled to Israel.
It is in that context that the failure of the United States and the countries of Western
Europe--all of which have overwhelming Christian majorities in their populations--to
protect or to accept as refugees many Middle Eastern Christians (and other minorities,
such as the Yazidis and Baha'i) is worth exploring. To be sure, Jews have been an oppressed
and endangered minority for a couple of thousand years, so the habits of rescue are deeply
ingrained in liturgy and in communal life. Christians have had two pretty good millennia, and
the idea that there are Christian communities being destroyed, and Christians being enslaved,
raped, and murdered because of their faith, may be hard for many Christians in the year 2015
to understand.
Nevertheless, it is true. Evangelical churches reacted powerfully in the 1990s to the persecution
of Christians in Sudan, and American policy there was more activist than it would have been
had they stayed silent. But in the last decade ancient Christian communities in Iraq and Syria
have been ravaged. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute has told the story in books and articles,
such as this portion of a recent National Review article:
ISIS and other Islamist extremists are waging Genocide, the most egregious of all humanrights atrocities, against Christians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, and other defenseless religious
minorities. Similar to Jews under Nazi domination during World War II, the Christians and
other minorities in the Middle East today are facing, in addition to the wartime privations
suffered by the general population, a relentless and deliberate extermination campaign being
carried out in the name of Islamic purification. In the summer of 2014, ISIS launched its
caliphate from Mosul by marking Christian homes with the red letter "N," for "Nazarene,"
before confiscating them and exiling their owners. Since then, it has pursued Christians and the
other minorities with a systematic intensity intended to delete every trace of their ancient
presence. Solely for their religion, Christians and Yazidis have been beheaded, enslaved,
abducted and sold, forcibly converted to Islam, and stripped of all their property. Their houses
of worship and their cultural artifacts have been expropriated or demolished, including the
fifth-century monastery in Qaraytain and Nineveh's fourth-century Mar Behnam monastery.
The facts are not really in doubt. Christians form decent-sized minorities in Egypt and Lebanon,
and tiny minorities elsewhere in the Middle East. Today those communities are (except, of
course, in Israel) under great risk--especially in Iraq and Syria--and thousands are fleeing for
their lives. So put aside for the moment the issue of additional military intervention in the
Middle East to protect them, and ask instead why we and the Europeans do not at least rescue
Christians who are fleeing. In the current European refugee crisis, only Hungary's repellent
prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has said that the West should do so. "We shouldn't forget that
the people who are coming here grew up in a different religion and represent a completely
different culture. Most are not Christian, but Muslim. That is an important question, because
Europe and European culture have Christian roots," he wrote. Donald Tusk, the Pole who is
president of the European Council, rebuked Orbán and said, "Referring to Christianity in a
public debate on migration must mean in the first place the readiness to show solidarity and
sacrifice. For a Christian it shouldn't matter what race, religion and nationality the person in
need represents."
So, no special treatment for Christians. U.S. policy follows the same pattern--in theory,
anyway. In practice Christians may actually have a harder time getting into the United States.
Nina Shea points out that the United States accepts only refugees referred to it by the U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees, but Christian and other religious minority refugees often
fear registering with the UNHCR and living in its camps because of their overwhelming
Muslim majorities. Whether those fears are well-founded is not the point, which is instead that
reliance on UNHCR referrals guarantees an under-representation of religious minorities
in our refugee inflow. Moreover, the State Department appears to favor a definition of
refugees as people persecuted by their government. That is a test Sunnis in Iraq and Syria
may be able to meet, but Christians will not: They are persecuted by various Muslim
groups such as the Islamic State rather than by the regimes in power. On such distinctions
do lives depend.
The Orbán-Tusk debate has not been reflected in much public discussion in the United States.
There are calls from Christian groups to do more in aiding Christian refugees, but there
is no great public controversy here about the subject. Why not?
A New York Times story last summer entitled "Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle
East?" reported that two-thirds of Iraqi Christians had fled their homeland, as well as a third of
Syria's Christians. But the story added, "It has been nearly impossible for two U.S. presidents-Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive liberal--to address the plight of
Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the crusader and 'clash of civilizations'
narratives the West is accused of embracing." When finally in 2014 the United States did act
to save an endangered religious minority, it was the Yazidis in Iraq. Christians got no such
favored treatment.
As that Times story suggested, fear of strengthening the "crusader" narrative no doubt
plays a part in such decisions. Let's even grant that Western Europe is "post-Christian":
Regular church attendance is down around the 10 percent level. But that's not true in the United
States, where churches are full of worshipers, not tourists, on Sundays and where an admission
of atheism would doom any presidential candidate.
One argument against rescuing Christians is that their communities in the Middle East date
from the time of Jesus and are ancient, beautiful, meaningful, historic. So it would be a shame
and a tragedy were those communities destroyed, or reduced in size to the point that they fell
apart. All true, and all irrelevant. The Christian refugees from those places did not decide
to leave their homes because they are uninterested in history or architecture, or because
they suddenly lost touch with their roots. They fled in fear of their lives. To put them at
a disadvantage because of the historic character of the places from which they flee is to
ask them to sacrifice their lives, their children, and their futures because we admire their
pasts. It is an immoral position.
A sense of fairness and unfairness must also play a role in our failure to single out
Christians. The main counter-argument will be that this is discrimination against
Muslims, for when one takes group A he is necessarily excluding group B. Not so, and a
policy of excluding Muslims from our refugee programs would be unlawful and hateful.
And even if the Europeans are afraid that new Muslim populations will never integrate and
assimilate, in the United States we need not share those fears. Unlike Europe, we have no
Muslim ghettoes here, and the history of Muslim immigrants is a successful one. The question
is not whether our refugee program should continue to accept members of all religious
groups, but whether we can take notice of the special horrors faced by Middle Eastern
Christians. All the refugees seem to be pitiful, and have fled their homes and roots to live
in miserable refugee camps or even train stations. How could we in good faith distinguish
among the refugees on the basis of religion?
Here's how: Christians are not random victims of widespread violence, disorder, or
economic collapse. Unlike their Muslim neighbors, they are targets. And unlike their
neighbors, they cannot flee to neighboring countries where their co-religionists are in the
majority and where prejudice and discrimination against them on the basis of religion
will be absent. In fact, most of the migrants in the flood going to Europe these days likely do
not qualify as refugees under international law. Escaping war or economic disaster, or trying
for a better life for one's family, does not meet the definition. Consider our own refugee and
asylum laws, in which targeting is the main idea. Overall conditions of disorder or lawlessness
back home will not get an applicant approved; only deliberate targeting for persecution (racial,
religious, political, or any other kind) will meet the test. The Immigration and Nationality Act
says asylum requires a "well-founded fear of persecution," a test many Muslim migrants
would not meet but Christians from Iraq and Syria certainly would.
Middle Eastern Christians are the targets of special venom and live with special risks, so
why is it unthinkable to give them special consideration for resettlement in the United
States? The United States has singled out special groups before, such as Cubans fleeing the
Castro regime and Jews fleeing Soviet Russia. It's a simple fact that they got better treatment
than many other refugees because their brethren in this country deeply believed it was needed
and was just, so they demanded it and organized to get it from our political system. And they
won. Remarkably, there are only about five million Jews in the United States and roughly two
million Cuban Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly 70 percent of the
U.S. population calls itself Christian by belief, which would mean more than 200 million
people. That's quite a large potential pressure group?--?if it ever got mobilized.
The ancient Jewish sage Hillel famously asked, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?" Jewish communities, long
accustomed to living under (mostly Christian) threat, have for two millennia understood the
need to organize to protect their endangered brethren elsewhere, but that understanding has not
yet become very widespread among American Christians.
Oddly, that was not true two centuries ago--when the Barbary pirates made a practice of
capturing Christian slaves and selling them into the Ottoman slave markets. The United States
paid ransoms and tribute, but also used its new navy to rescue Christians from captivity. In
1803, when Stephen Decatur bravely led a mission to destroy the captured American frigate
USS Philadelphia, Pope Pius VII said this action "had done more for the cause of Christianity
than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages." In 1815, the young United
States fought the Second Barbary War against pirates in North Africa. The American and
British navies forced the locals to release all Christian slaves and prisoners in 1816 (there were
over 1,000) and agree to stop the kidnappings. Of course the young United States acted to
protect its honor, its commerce and shipping, and its nationals, not in a new crusade against
Islam. But actions meant to rescue Christians would no more be a new crusade today than they
were 200 years ago.
Today, Christians are under special threat in the Middle East. The possibility that
Christian refugees will be able to go home and reconstruct their communities and lead
normal lives is far lower than are the chances for their Muslim neighbors. The level of
continuing discrimination and physical threat against them is high, and in Syria and Iraq
they will always constitute tiny and powerless groups. The argument for reaching out to
rescue Christian refugees and those from other threatened religious minorities is clear:
They are worse off than their Muslim neighbors. They face special circumstances, of
which we should in all fairness take account. To turn away from them because they are
Christian and we do not wish to be accused of favoritism toward Christians is a shameful
position for Americans--Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist--to take.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
and author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Humanitarian Aid to Middle-East Refugees Is Fully Mobilized
but Why Aren’t Displaced Christians Making It to the US?
By VICTOR GAETAN - Hawre Khalid/Catholic Relief Services - October 14, 2015.
http://english.ankawa.com/
https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/catholic-refugee-aid-fully-mobilized/
About 400,000 Chaldeans and Assyrians are in the U.S. Their relatives in Iraq and Syria are
in severe distress.
Since 2007, the Chaldean community groups have helped about 30,000 newcomers settle
in this country, helping them find jobs and establish credit and establish businesses.
(Unfortunately, one of the most high-profile refugee cases involving Chaldeans in recent
months involves a group in California being deported for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border
illegally.)
“This is a very successful refugee resettlement program because there is so much
community support,” explained Manna. “Chaldeans and Assyrians — we are one here
— create jobs; we don’t take jobs. With a little support, with economic and religious
freedom, our newcomers excel.”
Manna’s parents migrated to Detroit in the late 1960s. Their first five children were born in
Baghdad; the next three — including Martin, the youngest — were born in the United States.
Manna is preoccupied with the dire situation in his family’s homeland: “The villages around
where my parents were born, on the Nineveh Plain, a biblical area, are empty now because
they are under IS (Islamic State) control. Our relatives fled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq,
where they are safe for now, but it is a hard life.” Resources are running out for them.
Discrimination Against IDPs?
According to Manna, thousands of displaced Christians want to come to the U.S., but
they aren’t allowed.
“I think the U.S. has a moral responsibility to aid these people, especially since, in Iraq, it
was U.S. policy that caused the chaos. So we are really frustrated with the administration,
because we have seen a slowdown this year in the acceptance of Christian refugees from Iraq
and Syria,” the Chaldean leader said.
He added, “They won’t even allow visas because they assume the visitors will seek
asylum, and many of our people are called IDPs [internally displaced persons], so they
aren’t even granted visas, let alone resettlement, for fear they won’t return.”
The issue of the U.S. State Department denying Iraqi Christians visas gained attention earlier
this year when Sister Diana Momeka, a Dominican Sister of St. Catherine of Siena from
Mosul, Iraq, was initially denied a visa to come testify before the House Foreign Affairs
Committee on Christian persecution.Sister Diana is categorized as an IDP living in Kurdistan
(a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq, bordering Turkey), since she fled her monastery
with other religious to escape Islamic State terrorists. She testified in person on May 13 at a
hearing on “Ancient Communities Under Attack: ISIS’ War on Religious Minorities” and
told Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., that Christians who were chased from the Nineveh
Plain “feel we are alone. We are abandoned. That is how we feel.”
As Martin Manna observed, and Sister Diana confirmed in her congressional testimony, the
Christian population in Iraq and Syria, which is barely surviving, once served as a
constructive bridge between cultures in the Middle East. “If you clear the Middle East of
Christians, you are losing a very moderate, educated population, which will lead to more
radicalization of the region,” observed Manna.
Highly aware of their own historical role, many Christians have tried to stay in the region,
hoping to be able to go back home. But some are losing this hope, and even Christian
clerics are increasingly recommending that believers resettle in the West if they can. As
a Catholic priest ministering in Kurdistan told The Guardian last spring: “Open the
gates; give my people visas” to save them.
Yet Patriarch Louis Sako, who leads the Chaldean Catholic Church in Baghdad, urged
Christians not to leave Iraq this fall.
Low Numbers
A new organization was created this summer, the Nineveh Council of America, to lobby
Washington policymakers on the fate of ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria, especially
Christians and Yazidis.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking group particularly persecuted by Islamic State forces
because they practice a religion with elements of Islam and Christianity. Some 650,000 lived
in the Nineveh Plain. In early October, The Daily Mail broke a horrific story on IS jihadists
forcing Yazidi women to abort their unborn children.
According to Delia Kashat, Nineveh Council director for government relations, the group has
made headway on Capitol Hill, encouraging lawmakers to write a letter to the president
proposing acceptance of more refugees, as Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., did, or sponsor
resolutions calling on the U.S. government and United Nations to do more to protect ethnic
and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria or to declare atrocities against them acts of
genocide.
Less progress has been made to increase the low numbers of Christians — or Yazidis,
for that matter — given refugee status or asylum in this country.
According to information provided to the Register by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of
Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), in Fiscal Year 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014-Sept. 30,
2015), the United States admitted approximately 1,700 Syrian refugees. Of those, 90 are
“members of religious minorities, including Christians,” so fewer than 100 Christians were
resettled in the U.S., despite cataclysmic offenses against their communities.
Regarding Iraq, PRM provided data stretching back eight years: “Of the more than
125,000 Iraqi refugees the United States has admitted since 2007, nearly 40% are
members of religious minorities,” which sounds much better than Syria, but since the
office provided neither annual breakdowns nor did it use the word “Christian,” it’s
impossible to discern recent trends.
Even the congressional proposals seem to avoid the word “Christian,” referring instead
to “persecuted religious minority refugees,” a habit Manna mentioned. He observed that
even sympathetic members of Congress “don’t want to be seen as giving special
attention to Christians, but the harsh reality is these are the people who are being
persecuted,” not just in areas now under IS control, but in the rest of the region, too. “Forget
IS — look at Baghdad, which has an alarming kidnapping rate. Christians are under
constant pressure; they live in fear as a result of intimidation by the majority
population,” he said.
Refugee Reality Warrior
For Ann Corcoran, editor of the Refugee Resettlement Watch website, the fundamental
problem is that the current system is rigged against Christians and even Catholic Church
charities can’t advocate for them.
The U.S. government relies on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) to certify who is a refugee, drawing candidates from refugee camps typically
managed by the U.N., which are places Christians in the Middle East avoid. “Virtually no
Christians go to the big [refugee] camps for fear for their safety, so they don’t get into the
normal refugee stream, which is how the State Department and HHS [Health and Human
Services] normally bring people in,” explained Corcoran.
Based on her review of State Department statistics on refugees accepted from Syria since Jan.
1, 2012, Corcoran estimates that 95% are Sunni Muslim, and approximately 50 people are
Christians, with only one Catholic and one Yazidi.
The U.S. government also allows the UNHCR to prioritize which populations from around
the world will be resettled here. For example, a review of online data covering refugee
arrivals by nationality in Fiscal Year 2015 finds far more refugees coming from Burma
(18,386) than from Iraq (12,676). In fact, Burma is the No. 1 source country for refugees this
year. According to Corcoran, it’s a result of U.N. priorities, not American choices or
interests. “The U.N. is picking our refugees, and Christians aren’t there,” Corcoran said.
Catholic Thinkers Weigh In
In a review of the book Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st-Century Tragedy
by George Marlin (St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), Opus Dei Father C. John McCloskey muses,
“I sometimes ask myself how we, in what remains of Christendom, cannot at the very least
offer refuge in the United States for any Christian family prepared to become citizens.”
Father McCloskey speculates that Western media pay little attention to Christian
persecution and politicians avoid the subject because to face it would require action. He
concludes that welcoming Christian refugees to the U.S. is required of us: “[W]e can offer
sanctuary and religious freedom to others, while we still have it. … And let us not be blind to
the fact that, while it [persecution] may be happening in the Middle East now, it can also
happen here.”
Some Catholic thinkers take a bleak view of the religious demographics Western society is
witnessing. Professor Peter Kreeft explained to LifeSiteNews: “We’re losing the faith.
Europe is almost already lost. The Muslims tried to conquer Europe by force of arms for over
1,000 years, and they failed. Now they are conquering it by the force of numbers, which is a
much more powerful weapon.”
The world must act NOW: Plea to save Christians in Syria from
ISIS barbarians
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/609728/Christian-genocide-Syria-Islamic-State-ISISpersecution-religious-leaders
By Caroline wheeler, political editor, Daily Express - Oct 4th
"Christians being crucified in Syria" GETTY
Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has joined calls demanding military action in
Syria
The Sunday Express revealed last week how scores of Christians have already been murdered
by Islamic State and thousands forced to leave ancient Christian communities in northeastern
Syria and western Iraq as the extremists demand they either convert to Islam, pay an
extortionate rate of tax or face execution.
More than 700,000 of Syria’s population of 1.1 million Christians have already been forced
to leave as IS militants expanded into the northwest of the country and it is believed there are
now no more than 250,000 Christians living in Syria.
Lord Carey added his voice to a lobby which includes members of the Rothschild dynasty
and Lord Weidenfeld, a Jewish peer who was saved from the Nazis in Austria in 1938.
Lord Carey said: “Time is running out for Christians in the region. It is 100 years since
Armenian and Assyrian Christians faced genocide and since then they have experienced
increasing persecution in the region.
Lord Carey added his voice to a lobby which includes members of the Rothschild dynasty
and Lord Weidenfeld. “They are now facing an existential threat to their very survival.
Successive UK governments have failed to do enough to support minority communities in the
Middle East and now sadly, many Christians have concluded they have no future in a region
where they have lived for nearly two thousand years.
“I urge David Cameron, to consider the claims of Christian communities for asylum and to
pursue both diplomatic and military means to end the threat of Islamist violence against
minority communities.”
Lord Weidenfeld has told how he feels he owes a “debt” to the Christians who saved him. He
has poured millions of pounds into charities which work to smuggle Christians to safety. So
far it has liberated 158 Christians from Syria and found them a new home in Poland.
Lord Weidenfeld joined the calls for military intervention, accusing President Obama of
doing too little. He said that the US should have troops on the ground and the UK should
push ahead with air strikes. He said: “I want the world to wake up to this. Many Christians
have concluded they have no future in a region where they have lived for nearly two
thousand years
Lord Carey: “I don’t want to be too bitter about this but everywhere we are facing this great
threat of jihadism. Europe is in danger of becoming infested with a lot of extremism. I would
pray and hope that the western world in general would be more militant and aggressive in the
fight against jihadism. More pressure should be put on President Obama, the leader of the
free world, to not just stamp his feet in the oval office but to put the boots on the ground.
“I would be in favour of Britain backing air-strikes. At the moment we are leaving the field to
Putin. That is why I am so critical of Obama.
“People say I shouldn’t be so outspoken but I am outspoken because I can trace every trouble
we have now to the lacklustre and undulating leadership of the American president. You
can’t just stamp your feet in the Oval and think there is all you have to do.”
He said that he had met religious leaders including the head of the UK Catholic church
Cardinal Vincent Nichols to discuss the issue.
Yvette Cooper, head of Labour’s refugee taskforce, said: “The torture, murder and
persecution being carried out by ISIL in Syria and Iraq is truly shocking. Yvette Cooper is
the newly appointed head of Labour's refugee task force. “They are targeting anyone who
gets in their way - Muslims, Christians, and those of any faith - with terrible barbarism.
"The Government commitment to take Syrian refugees from the UNHCR camps is a
welcome first step. However many of the Christian refugees are not in the camps and they
desperately need help too. Those who have fled to find sanctuary in church halls and
makeshift settlements also desperately need help.
“Much more needs to be done to find a sustainable end to the conflict, and also to provide
sanctuary for those fleeing persecution. We must stand ready to help those of all religions
who face horrific persecution at the hands of Islamic State.”
The Prime Minister has previously said that Christians would be included in the
Government’s vulnerable persons resettlement scheme – although no detail has been
provided as to how they will reach them.
THE EUROPEAN MIGRANT CRISIS
U.N. Sees Refugee Flow to Europe Growing, Plans for Big Iraq
Displacement
GENEVA (Reuters) -- Amin Awad, regional refugee coordinator for the U.N. refugee
agency UNHCR, said on Friday he did not expect the flow of about 8,000 refugees per
day into Europe to abate, and warned that it could be "the tip of the iceberg".
Dominik Bartsch, the U.N.'s deputy humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said 10 million
people in Iraq were expected to need humanitarian support by the end of the year, where
3.2 million are already displaced.
He said the United Nations was planning for the displacement of 500,000 people from the
Iraqi city of Mosul if Iraqi forces launch an attempt to recapture the city from Islamic
State.
UN: Thousands of Iraqis Likely to Join Exodus to Europe
By Lisa Schlein 26the September
http://www.aina.org/news/20150926143637.htm
GENEVA (VOA) -- A senior United Nations official says thousands of Iraqis are likely to flee
to Europe in search of asylum as conditions in their country worsen and they lose hope of any
changes for the better.
Saying the situation in the country is deteriorating, Dominik Bartsch, the U.N. deputy
humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, says 10 million Iraqis, more than one quarter of the
population, will need some form of humanitarian aid to survive by the end of the year. He says
this figure includes 3.2 million internally displaced people and people living in areas
controlled by the so-called Islamic State group, known as ISIL or ISIS. He says the crisis
has accelerated since the group seized large portions of Iraq last year.
Since then, he says a counteroffensive by Iraqi security forces with the support of a U.S.-led
coalition has added to the displacement. "There is new displacement happening every day out
of Anbar province. We are looking at preparedness for what likely may be a much larger flow,"
he said. "You all heard of Mosul, the second largest city of Iraq under control of ISIL ... If a
counteroffensive is launched against Mosul, that inevitably will affect the civilian population
and we anticipate that close to half a million will then be displaced."
Bartsch says only 10 percent of the internally displaced Iraqis are living in camps. The
majority is staying with family and friends or squatting in half-finished buildings.
Bartsch also says a cholera outbreak last week is now confirmed and likely to spread.
He says 77 health ports have been closed for lack of money, and that food and water
supplies have been drastically reduced. He says the United Nations is cash-strapped and
has had to radically cut back on basic services.
The U.N. official also notes many Iraqi children have been out of school for more than a
year. He says the inability of parents to provide them with an education is contributing
to the decision by many to leave. He says thousands of desperate people who see no hope.
Thank Germany for the Influx of Fake Syrians
By Jillian Kay Melchior 15th October
National Review Online
Serbia -- Few pause at the border between Serbia and Croatia. An observer might have thought
the rush was caused by the rain, unrelenting on Sunday, turning the lush farmlands id into a
filthy, shoe-sucking quagmire. But rain was not the only reason to hurry. Europe's migrants
seemed propelled quickly onward by both their past and their future, the chaos they fled and
the stability they yearn for.
The rush makes for short interviews. Mucking through the boggy ground, I walked briskly to
keep up with some of my interlocutors, scribbling in my notebook as I moved. So I was
delighted when a young man in a poncho stopped to talk with me, speaking in fragmented but
passable English, his family beside him. The littlest child, dressed in a red coat, gnawed on an
inflated animal balloon, and as we spoke, I nervously contemplated choking hazards.
The man introduced himself only as "Karman," refusing to give his last name but nodding when
I showed him the spelling of his first. We photographed them. I asked him where he and his
family were from and why they had left. He answered immediately that he'd fled Kobani, Syria,
a town on the Turkish border heavily attacked by the Islamic State last year. He told me that
his father died in Kobani, along with others. "It's not easy living there. My friend was killed. I
saw him shot in the head, pop, to the street. I saw it," he said, adding he was scared of the war.
As he spoke, the kid in the red coat bit the balloon harder, and it popped loudly. Everyone
flinched. "Kobani is boom" -- like the balloon, he said.
It was all a lie. I posted the photo of "Karman" on my Instagram, along with a brief quote he'd
given me. Within hours, a peshmerga friend from Iraq messaged me, telling me that "Karman"
was actually Karwan Rahman, also known as Karwan Chewar. He's a well-known TV reporter
from Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, one of the few relatively tranquil places in Iraq. He'd made up
the entire story he told me. I contacted his editors at NRT TV, who confirmed the man in the
photo was indeed Karwan, though they did not confirm his current employment status. "We
have spoken to Karwan, who denies saying he is from Kobani," said an editor at NRT. "We
have no further statement to give at this time." Another of Karwan's NRT colleagues told me
Karwan had arrived in Austria since we spoke; he again, according to the NRT colleague,
denied he had lied to me.
The editors would not provide Karwan's phone numbers, so I messaged him through Facebook
asking him to explain why he'd told me he was from Kobani. I received no response by
deadline.
As Europe reckons with the biggest migration shift since World War II, experiences like this
have become commonplace, in large part because of German policies.
Under the Dublin Regulation, newcomers can apply for asylum only in the first European
Union country they entered; those who seek it elsewhere risk deportation. But in late August,
the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees announced it would suspend this policy
and offer special treatment to refugees from Syria. Even if newcomers from Syria had passed
through other EU countries before arriving, they would be allowed to stay in Germany while
their asylum applications were processed.
Germany also offers some of the most prodigal assistance packages in Europe for asylum
seekers, including cash benefits, housing, child-care benefits, language courses, and food
stamps. Berlin has already estimated it will spend at least $6.7 billion caring for the
800,000 migrants and refugees estimated to arrive in 2015.
So suddenly, it pays to be Syrian -- or at least, to claim to be -- at a time when
overwhelmed European nations are struggling to properly identify and track the
hundreds of thousands of newcomers surging across the borders.
"People were prepared to abuse the system," says Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for the
Hungarian government, which has taken a more hard-line approach than Germany on the crisis.
Many of the newcomers are flagrantly engaging in "asylum-shopping" or "asylum
tourism," he explains, because "they want to go to the wealthiest parts of the European
Union."
Among those who have registered in Hungary, at least a third claim to be from Syria, Kovacs
says. And last week, Foreign Policy reported that officials at a registration center in Kara Tepe,
Greece, estimate that of the 3,000 to 5,000 people who arrived daily over the summer, half said
they were Syrian. Some were caught lying outright, for example, after failing to identify Syrian
currency, despite claiming Syria as their home country.
"Legal [immigration] is not a choice for many, because they come from safe countries,"
Kovacs says. "They don't have papers, or they don't want to have papers."
Confirming the nationalities of those crossing the border has also proven difficult for
journalists. Some making the journey were able to show me their full ID cards from their
country of origin. Others have given me their names, allowing me to track them online and
reasonably confirm their past. But others simply have no way of proving they are who they say
they are.
Some without identification really are Syrian. They forgot or couldn't gather their papers in the
blur of an emergency departure, or they lost them along the way. Ed: or they were stolen from
them by militias. Babies born en route, of course, lack paperwork from their parents' home
countries. Genuine refugees face even greater obstacles now that there's an incentive to lie
about national origin.
And this also opens up other disconcerting possibilities. At best, fraudulent "Syrians" are
simply seeking the best possible financial set-up in their new European home. But Europe was
already coping with financial strain, and the waves of asylum-seekers have only deepened that
problem.
Even worse, some crossing European borders might be faking their identities with the
intention of committing acts of violence or terrorism. "Young men with backpacks are
coming in unregistered, unchecked, and we don't know what's in that backpack," says
Eugene Megyesy, a senior adviser to Hungary's prime minister.
Hungarian police have found phones discarded at the borderline, including some with
disturbing or violent photos on them, says Andras Lanczi, the chairman of the Budapestbased Szazadveg Foundation, which has close ties to the government. It's unclear whether the
phones' owners took these pictures because they were witnesses to or perpetrators of violence.
With all of this in mind, it seems I lucked out with Karwan. He wasn't dangerous. And from
what I can see, his credibility has rightly taken a hit with his home audience: "Shame on him,"
one Instagram commenter wrote on my posting. Another was less subtle, saying he's "simply
a fxxxxxg liar whom I wanna punch in the face whenever I get the chance."
My hope is that Karwan gets only what he legally -- and professionally -- merits in Europe. I
also pray that the truly deserving Syrian war refugees, who have seen their credibility
diminished by liars such as Karwan, find the peace and stability they seek. Still, in an era of
fake Syrians, it's impossible not to appreciate Europeans' growing unease.
Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Review as a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the
Franklin Center. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum and the Tony
Blankley Fellow at the Steamboat Institute.
Close Quarters: Asylum Shelters in Germany Struggle with
Violence
By Matthias Bartsch, Markus Deggerich, Horand Knaup, Ann-Katrin Müller, Conny
Neumann, Barbara Schmid, Fidelius Schmid, Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt and Steffen Winter
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/asylum-shelters-in-germany-strugglewith-refugee-violence-a-1056393.html
There has been a rising number of violent incidents in German refugee hostels in recent
weeks and concern is growing among officials. But some communities are finding
creative ways to make life more tolerable in the asylum homes.
Two men are waiting for their lunch inside a drafty airport hangar -- one is an 80-year-old
from Pakistan, the other an 18-year-old Albanian. A throng of people are waiting and the line
can take up to an hour, but the young man has run out of patience. He climbs over the barrier
and pushes forward, gets his food and then sits down at a table. A short time later, the elderly
man addresses him angrily.
A dispute that began banally enough on Sunday, Sept. 27, ended in a mass brawl after the
young Albanian hit the old man in the face. A security guard intervened and was able to pull
the two apart, but three hours later, 50 to 60 Pakistanis stormed into the hangar and
threatened the young Albanian with aluminum rods they had taken from their cots. The police
moved in and were initially able to restore peace. Come dinner time, though, 300 angry
Albanians had turned up. Some attacked the Pakistanis, benches were thrown, men struck
each other with clubs and used pepper spray.
Police estimate that more than 350 of the 1,500 refugees staying in the emergency shelter at
the Calden Airport near the city of Kassel became involved in the fight. The incident resulted
in 14 injuries, including police officers. Two weeks prior, another altercation at Calden left
60 people injured.
Mounting Tensions
There have been other violent outbreaks at hostels in Ellwangen in the state of BadenWürttemberg, Suhl in Thuringia, Bramsche in Lower Saxony, Trier in Rhineland-Palatinate,
Heidenau in Saxony, as well as in Dresden and Leipzig. Indeed, an explosive mood is
developing in many of the refugee camps across Germany, most of which have become
overcrowded. Police situation reports from across the country describe a growing propensity
to violence in the hostels.
In one refugee hostel in the town of Königsbrunn in Bavaria, police claim to have found
machetes constructed using bed frames -- "two approximately one-meter-long (three-foot-
long) pipes with knives attached to them," as well as a "chair leg whose tip had been shaped
into a club and four iron pipes, each about one meter in length."
At the beginning of September, inside a trade fair exhibition hall that had been converted into
a refugee hostel in the town of Sinsheim in Baden-Württemberg, 200 to 300 asylum-seekers
began fighting. A police report notes that security guards were so frightened after a man
accused of participating in the brawl pulled a knife on them that they fled the scene.
In August alone, police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia were dispatched 926 times to
refugee accommodations -- far more frequently than in previous months. Often they are
responding to reports of bodily injury, but other times it's as simple as someone having pulled
the fire alarm. Rainer Wendt, the head of DPolG, Germany's second-largest police union,
says that officials are "facing the greatest challenge in postwar history."
'Violence Is Unacceptable'
Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has also expressed concern over the recent violence.
Given the fact that almost all hostels are overcrowded, he said last Friday, "I can understand
criticism of the lodgings. But (violence) is unacceptable." He was careful to note that those
engaged in such fisticuffs are "a minority," but also stated that Germany expects asylumseekers here to also live up to a certain code of conduct.
Germany's competing police officers' unions are now calling for refugees to be separated and
housed according to their religion. It's a proposal Thuringia Governor Bodo Ramelow had
already made in August after the offices of a refugee reception center in the town of Suhl had
been severely vandalized. Six government workers and 11 refugees were injured in the
altercation.
But experts like Roger Lewentz, the interior minister of Rhineland-Palatinate and a member
of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), say that dividing asylum-seekers based on
confession or ethnicity is "nearly impossible" in practice. Every day, hundreds of new
arrivals are showing up at the initial reception centers in the state. Officials in the state capital
of Mainz say they are having a tough enough time as it is just ensuring people have access to
beds and roofs over their heads. "We really need to get away from this kind of
overcrowding," says Dieter Lauinger, the justice and migration minister for the state of
Thuringia with the Green Party.
Just how dramatic the situation has become can be seen in Berlin where, each morning,
hundreds of refugees surge inside the State Office for Health and Social Affairs immediately
after its doors are opened as they seek the best spot in the long lines. At times, pushing and
shoving can be the order of the day.
Efforts to contain the chaos through crowd barriers and additional security personnel have all
failed. Asylum-seekers are supposed to wait in specific lines based on their particular issues,
but nobody is respecting the queues. People have simply been making their way to the front
of whatever line they can find and then refuse to move to the appropriate line once they find
it is the wrong one. It took hours and many interpreters in order to ease the impasse after one
recent incident.
'Tension and Aggression in the Air'
Despite working 12-hour shifts, employees at the state office say they have been unable to get
on top of the situation. "There is a lot of tension and aggression in the air," says one worker.
Hall 4 at the Leipzig Trade Fair complex is 144 meters long (472 feet), 144 meters wide and
eight meters tall, a uniform block for parties, company events, presentations and conferences.
Since the beginning of September, it has been home to refugees. Initially, 700 refugees were
supposed to take up residence in the "temporary accommodations." By the time the situation
here spun out of control last Thursday, some 1,800 were calling it home.
Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis are living in the facility, a mix of cultures
painstakingly spread out into 200 cabins covered in a makeshift manner with sheets. Workers
with the local chapter of the Red Cross thought they had the situation under control, but then
200 Syrians and Afghans began fighting with each other.
Police reported the brawl was triggered when a 17-year-old Afghan boy threatened an 11year-old girl from Syria with a knife. The girl sought protection from her uncle, who then
took the boy to task. The events triggered an explosion of anger and violence. Security guards
and members of the German military also got attacked in the outburst. Police took six
Afghans into custody as a result of the altercation.
Monotonous Days
Following day after day of monotony and emptiness with nothing meaningful to do, and
restless nights in overcrowded tents or halls, it often doesn't take much to trigger a fullfledged conflict. Aid workers report that the disputes are often triggered banal, daily realities
like the shared use of toilets and showers. Most often, they are the product of people having
to wait in long lines for food. In one reception center in the city of Trier, though, all it took to
spark a fight was for a team of Syrian refugees to score a goal against a team from Albania
during a football game in July. It took 70 police officers to stop the mass brawl that ensued.
One possible solution to this kind of cabin fever could be smaller, more decentralized refugee
accommodations. The town of Elchingen in Bavaria, for example, hasn't experienced any of
these problems with its refugees. Things have remained relatively peaceful. The town is
home to 9,000 residents as well as 80 asylum-seekers from different countries. They are
comprised largely of young men and they are spread out among two large buildings. The fact
that the refugees here are managing to live together as well as they are is in part due to the
intensive efforts of volunteers here. Local helpers take asylum-seekers out on excursions,
during which they listen to the concerns they have. "That eliminates a lot of the tension," says
local Mayor Joachim Eisenkolb.
In addition, the community has engaged a Syrian student who speaks several Arabic dialects.
Together with a volunteer, he visits the hostels every Sunday to hear their concerns. That
method meant that conflicts were discussed before they became acute, the mayor says. Most
of the time, he adds, the sources of conflict were relatively banal -- for example that someone
never cleaned up the kitchen. "The magic formula is proactive help," says Eisenkolb. "The
people aren't going to come to us of their own accord."
More Violence Coming?
Such strategies can also work on a larger scale. In the gymnasium at the University of Siegen,
around 200 refugees from around 13 different ethnicities have found shelter, including Iraqis,
Pakistanis, Albanians and Kosovars. "Thus far, everything has gone well," says Rector
Holger Burckhart. He says there are clear reasons for the success: "There are contact persons
for each group, either from among the refugees themselves or from the 80-person interpreter
pool assembled by the student body."
Burckhardt believes that separating the refugees according to religion or nationality is the
wrong way to go. You just have to treat them with respect and give them something to do, he
says. "If you just cram them together and make them wait for months on end, it shouldn't
come as a surprise if something happens."
Experts believe that there could be more violence in the coming months. One reason is the
sheer number of arrivals. September saw a record number of refugees reaching Germany and
reception facilities have had a hard time erecting tents and cots fast enough. Interior Minister
Thomas de Maizière, of Merkel's Christian Democrats, said last week that between 8,000 and
10,000 refugees were arriving in Germany every day. But another reason is the decision by
Merkel's cabinet last Tuesday to allow refugees to remain in reception facilities for six
months instead of three months, as had been the practice to that point. Furthermore, asylumseekers from the Western Balkans, like those from Albania and Kosovo, are to be kept at
such facilities for the duration of their application proceedings and not distributed among
more permanent facilities in the municipalities.
Sexual Assault Concerns
"That results in the reception facilities becoming even fuller and the pressure even greater,"
says Marei Pelzer of the human rights organization Pro Asyl. The potential for aggressive
behavior, she says, grows when refugees begin to realize that such reception facilities are the
end of the road for their asylum hopes. In Calden, for example, some of those involved in the
brawl had just learned that they wouldn't be allowed to stay," says a woman who works in the
cafeteria. "They were, of course, correspondingly excitable."
An additional problem has been the apparently growing number of sexual assaults targeting
women and children in the refugee shelters. The number of attacks is constantly climbing,
according to the federal government's commissioner for abuse, Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig. The
perpetrators, he says, aren't just male migrants, but also guards and volunteers.
As early as mid-August, aid groups were reporting "numerous rapes" in the reception facility
in Giessen, in the state of Hesse. Since then, such reports have accumulated across the
country. Single women no longer feel safe showering or going to the toilet at night, according
to the reports. Hesse Interior Minister Peter Beuth has confirmed that police are aware of four
sexual assaults in the Giessen camp and added that the number in Hesse is "in the area of the
low double digits."
Rörig, though, says the number of unreported cases is likely enormously high. "We are in an
extremely critical situation," he says, adding that he has demanded that organizational
improvements quickly be made in the hostels, including the implementation of minimal
standards like contact persons for possible victims, lockable toilet stalls, separate shower
facilities for men and women and safe places for children.
Counteracting the Best Intentions
Rörig has sent letters to all state and federal ministries as well as to the Chancellery, but thus
far to no avail. He is now demanding that the German parliament make improvements to the
changes Merkel's cabinet recently made to Germany's asylum laws. He wants to see refugee
hostels forced to adhere to existing licensing requirements for facilities that work with
children. It is wrong, he believes, to allow a situation where refugee children live according
to laxer standards than other children in the country. "Children's well-being must have
priority," Rörig says.
Officials are doing "all they can," says Hesse Interior Minister Beuth. They are trying to
ensure that solitary women, and mothers with children, be given separate lodgings. But the
huge number of refugees, he says, sometimes counteracts the best intentions.
The situation is particularly challenging for those suffering from war-related trauma or those
who belonged to an oppressed minority back home. People like 23-year-old Rami, for
example, who no longer wants to keep his homosexuality a secret. On his journey from the
Syrian town of Daraa to Germany, he bought himself a rainbow armband, which he proudly
wears around his wrist. In Europe, Rami thought, homosexuals are free and safe.
But then he ended up in a tent city in Dresden, a temporary camp for up to 1,100 refugees in
an industrial area near the Elbe River. Up to 30 men are forced to share a tent, sleeping on
cots set up frame-to-frame. Before long, Rami says, other asylum-seekers began harassing
him -- Arabs, Afghans and Pakistanis. They called him "girl" and told him to "dance for us."
Once, as he was waiting for food, he was bombarded by rocks. Another time, the young
Syrian claims, he was chased through the camp.
Rami was lucky. Aid workers were able to find him a spot in a shared apartment. Not long
ago, he moved into a small, two-room apartment in the center of Dresden with three other gay
refugees.
'Convert or Die, the Caliphate is Here': 'ISIS' Message to
Assyrian Christians in Sweden
By Carey Lodge - Christian Post - 14th October
http://www.aina.org/news/20151014145500.htm
The
left picture shows the Arabic letter "n" (inside red circle), signifying "Nasrani" (Christian), on
a Christian home in Mosul in July, 2014. The right picture shows the same mark drawn this
week on an Assyrian store in Gothenburg, Sweden.Assyrian Christians in Gothenburg have
been threatened with messages linked to Islamic State, according to local reports.
Swedish Daily Newspaper 'Dagens Nyheter' (DN) reports that ISIS symbols and other graffiti
were found painted on two stores owned by Assyrians on Tuesday.
Along with the ISIS logo, "the caliphate is here", "convert or die" and the Arabic letter 'N', ?,
were also painted on the walls of the Le Pain Francois bakery and the next-door pizzeria.
Short for Nazarene, ? was painted on homes belonging to Christians by ISIS militants in Mosul
when it was captured last year to identify members of the faith. Jihadists later drove them out
of the city, telling them to either flee, convert to Islam, or pay a tax. Those who refused were
killed.
"I felt a sudden chill down my spine. It's terribly painful, we feel threatened," Markus
Samuelsson, who owns Le Pain Francois, told DN.
"Our family fled Turkey for Sweden in the 70s. What we're exposed to reminds us of the stories
we were told as children. It's very real and threatening, and we're terrified."
Chairman of the Assyrian district in Gothenburg, Josef Garis, told DN that the police are
investigating the case. "The persecution of the past feels near," he said.
Earlier this year, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that at least 150 people had travelled
to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS from Gothenburg. Terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp has called
the city "the Swedish Center for Jihadists", despite it having a relatively small population of
490,000.
Last week, ISIS released a video showing three Assyrian Christians being killed in Syria, and
militants have threatened to kill 180 more if a ransom isn't paid.
An ancient branch of Christianity, the Assyrian Church of the East has roots dating back to the
1st century AD. Assyrian Christians speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and have origins in
ancient Mesopotamia -- a territory which spreads across northern Iraq, north-east Syria and
south-eastern Turkey.
01/10/2015 - Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, International Director of Barnabas Fund
"It’s what we’ve been saying all along, but now Western governments are beginning to see
that Christian refugees fleeing Middle East violence are being targeted precisely because
of their faith. This means that, even when they are out of the geographical danger zone,
they remain at risk because of their Christian identity.
Barnabas is helping to feed needy Christians in Jordan
In Germany, the deputy head of the police union, Jörg Radek, has urged authorities to
provide separate housing for Christian refugees and Muslim refugees in the country,
after two clashes left 14 people wounded on Sunday (27 September). In the second
outbreak at the Kassel-Calden temporary migrant shelter, almost 400 refugees were involved.
“The police have reached their absolute breaking point,” said Mr Radek. “Our officials
are increasingly being called to confrontations in refugee homes.” Minor arguments and
conflicts can escalate rapidly under such tense and packed conditions, but religion is the
unspoken undercurrent.
Similarly, in Sweden, two Syrian Christian families seeking asylum were persecuted by
Syrian Muslims living in the same shelter and were forced to move out. The Muslims
would not allow the Christians to use the communal areas of the house and said they
had to hide their crosses.
In April, twelve Christians drowned when they were thrown overboard by Muslim
aggressors on an inflatable boat crossing the Mediterranean from the Libyan coast. Other
Christians on board later reported, “To protect ourselves we formed a sort of human chain,
linking arms to resist being pushed overboard.”
Barnabas has been alerting governments and the Western public to this for months.
Christians escaping Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Iraq and Syria seldom go to the main
refugee camps in neighbouring countries because they are marginalised, abused, and at
serious risk of violence in these Muslim-majority shelters.
Western countries currently in the process of receiving hundreds of thousands of
Middle Eastern refugees must understand that vulnerable Christians are being
overlooked in rescue programmes that take only those in the camps to safety. Fully
aware of the victimisation that is likely to await them in refugee camps, Iraqi and Syrian
believers are mainly taking shelter in schools, churches, and apartments, or with relatives
where possible.
Barnabas is urging governments to recognise the extreme vulnerability of displaced
Christians from Syria and Iraq. To rescue Christians in danger, governments must
make committed efforts to look beyond the refugee camps and to find the Christians
where they are.
'Refugees Don't Leave Their Conflicts Behind'
By http://www.dw.com
Syndicated News 3rd October
Following reports of aggressive incidents in German refugee shelters, authorities are looking
for ways to calm the situation. Suggestions include separate housing for Muslim and
Christian asylum-seekers.
There are no official statistics, but aid organizations, social workers and volunteers note that
ethnic, social, cultural and religious tensions are on the rise in Germany's overcrowded refugee
shelters.
Separating refugees according to religion is now being mentioned as an interim solution to help
alleviate the problems.
Up to one million migrants are expected to arrive in the country before the end of the year. The
sudden surge in asylum demands this year has authorities scrambling for housing for refugees
from war zones such as Syria, but also migrants from Albania and Kosovo. Often converted
hotels, gyms, schools and tents are used as makeshift shelters.
Tempers flare easily at close quarters. In Leipzig last week, about 200 refugees wielding table
legs and bed frames started a fight after they couldn't agree who got to use one of the few toilets
first. It took a large police contingent to calm the situation.
Tip of the iceberg
Other recent incidents include a riot at a refugee shelter in central Germany over a torn Koran
and Muslim Chechens beating up Syrian Christians in a Berlin shelter.
Islam is a part of Germany, but Islamism clearly isn't, said opposition Greens party leader Cem
Özdemir, adding that tolerance must not be misinterpreted and exploited as weakness.
But insults, threats, discrimination and blackmail against Christian asylum-seekers in particular
are a regular occurrence, according to the Munich-based Central Council for Oriental
Christians (ZOCD).
"I've heard so many reports from Christian refugees who were attacked by conservative
Muslims," said Simon Jacob, of the Central Council for Oriental Christians (ZOCD).
But that's only the tip of the iceberg,
The refugees are afraid and mistrustful of authorities, and worried about possible retribution
against their families at home, so they rarely call the police, he explained. They have to learn
that they have duties and rights in Germany, Jacob said.
Overcrowding isn't the main issue anyway, Jacob argued - it's merely the trigger: "People bring
with them the conflicts that exist in their native countries, Christians and Muslims, Kurds and
extremists, Shiites and Sunnis - they don't leave them behind at the border." These conflicts
erupt when the refugees - often traumatized - are forced to live close together, he added.
Quick fix
For the time being, different religions could be housed separately, Jacob said - but stressed that
can only be an interim solution.
It's of the utmost importance that the refugees be integrated in the German system of values,
otherwise, they will live in parallel societies, he warned.
The eastern state of Thuringia already tries to house refugees separately depending on their
country of origin, but declines to separate them by religion. "Intensely religious" Muslims
above all must learn to live with other religions, Migration Minister Dieter Lauinger said.
Bavaria takes into account ethnic background and religion. "Bavaria won't condone attacks on
asylum-seekers, and that includes conflicts among the refugees," said Emilia Müller, the
state's Minister for Social Affairs.
Police lack resources
Not just local authorities are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and tasks - German police
feel overburdened, too.
"The police are at their limits," said Jörg Radek, deputy chief of Germany's police union GdP.
Officers are tasked with registering newcomers, reconciling differences in the shelters and
protecting them from far-right extremist attacks.
"We have to do everything in our power to prevent further violence in the shelters," Radek said
- and urged housing people of different religions separately.
Different groups band together, and that can quickly turn into a major brawl, Radek said. "In
that case, it's not enough to send a lone patrol car," Radek said.
Private security firms already guard some refugee shelters, but according to the refugees, their
staff usually stays out of religiously-motivated strife.
But Radek urged hiring even more private security offices to take the pressure off regular police
officers. Ideally, the municipalities should hire security personnel experienced in intercultural
affairs, he said: "Personnel that understands the various refugee groups' idiosyncrasies."
Muslims Persecute Christian Refugees in Germany
By Daniel Greenfield- Frontpage Magazine - 3rd October
If you hate the Islamic State, why take in Muslim refugees to repeat its crimes on European
soil? Taking in Muslim refugees only perpetuates the Muslim persecution of Christians.
Muslim migrants have already drowned Christians seeking asylum. They are persecuting
Christian refugees who have made it to Europe:
Said went across Turkey on foot. He never thought that his problems would only be starting
once he made it to Germany.
"In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have arrested my brother in a house church. I fled the
Iranian secret police, because I thought in Germany I can finally freely live by my religion,"
says Said. "But in the home for asylum seekers, I can't even openly admit that I am a Christian."
Mainly Syrian refugees, mostly devout Sunni Muslims, live in the home. "They wake me
before dawn during Ramadan and say that I should eat before the sun comes up. If I refuse,
they say, I'm a, kuffar ', an unbeliever. They spit at me," says Said. "They treat me like an
animal. And threaten to kill me."
Said says he has called the Security Service which not interested in his problems. "They are
also all Muslims."
In the community room of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Trinity in Berlin-Steglitz pastor
Gottfried Martens sits with a stack of papers...
Around 600 Afghans and Iranians belong to his church. Most of them he himself baptized.
"Almost all have big problems in their homes," says Martens.
"Devout Muslims teach there the view: Where we are, there is the Sharia, there is our law."
In the kitchen, Christians can not prepare their own food. Those who do not pray five times a
day toward Mecca, are being bullied. "Above all, Christians who have converted from Islam
have to suffer as a minority," says Martens. "And they ask the question: Will we have to hide
ourselves as Christians in the future in this country?"...
In Hemer, Algerian asylum seekers attacked an Eritrean and his pregnant wife. Both wore their
baptismal cross around their necks. One struck the Eritreans with a glass bottle.
A young Syrian in Giessen reported threats. He is concerned that among the refugees fare
ollowers of the terrorist group Islamic State of (IS) are. "They shout Quranic verses. These are
words that shouts the IS before they cut off people's heads. I can not stay here. I am a Christian,"
he says.
Especially dramatic is the case of a Christian family from Iraq, which was housed in a refugee
camp in the Bavarian Freising. The father told a TV crew of the Bayerischer Rundfunk of
beatings and threats by Syrian Islamists. "They yelled at my wife and beat my child. They say..
"We will kill you and drink your blood" The family lived in the rooms of the home as prisoners
- until they no longer stand it and returned to Iraq."
"One would have to protect the family," says Simon Jacob of the Central Council of the Eastern
Christians. Stories like these no longer surprise him. "I know of a lot of reports of Christian
refugees who are under attack. But that's just the tip of the iceberg," says Jacob. "The number
of unreported cases is high."...
"Often the aggressors are Afghans or Pakistanis who are often more Islamist than many Syrians
and Iraqis," says Max Klingberg of the International Society for Human Rights, who has been
active in refugee aid for fifteen years. He assumes that the violence in the refugee centers will
continue to increase. "We must rid ourselves of the illusion that all those who arrive here, are
human rights activists. Among the new arrivals is a not small number at least as intense as the
Muslim Brotherhood."
This must stop. The crimes of Islam must stop at the European border.
There is no sense of taking in members of the oppressor group with members of the oppressed
group. Muslim migration to Europe must end.
IRAN
Contradicting reality, Iranian leaders claim religious minorities
have “absolute freedom”
Barnabas Fund 30/09/2015
“Today, all religious minorities enjoy absolute freedom under the Islamic Republic and
freely practise their faith,” claimed Iran’s General Director of Politics at the Ministry of
Interior, Mohammad Amin Rezazadeh, according to Mohabat News. With an estimated
90 Christians currently being held in prison, the statement hides a catalogue of abuses
against the country’s Christian minority.
Earlier this year, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, claimed in a meeting at
the Iranian parliament (majlis) building with members of various religious minorities that,
“after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there is no record of aggression by
Muslims against non-Muslims”.
In reality, Iran’s underground house churches are frequently raided and Christians rounded
up as part of an ongoing crackdown to prevent the spread of Christianity. On 7 August, at
least eight Christians were beaten and arrested when armed officials raided a house church in
the city of Karaj, in northern Iran.
Only recognised Christian minorities are allowed to meet together to worship in church
buildings in Iran. The recognised groups are the Armenian and Assyrian Christians who have
long been present in the country after they fled the genocide sanctioned against them by the
Ottoman Empire. Muslim converts to Christianity, who meet in underground house churches,
are persecuted by the authorities.
In good news, Pastor Farshid Fathi, who was arrested in a similar raid on 26 December 2010,
and sentenced to six years in prison, was told on 4 July that he would be released early, on 10
December 2015. He had expected to be detained until December 2017.
Pastor Fathi, now 36 years of age, was 17 when he came to faith in Christ. When he was
arrested he was held in solitary confinement initially and subjected to brutal interrogations. In
March 2012, the father of two was sentenced to six years in prison for “acting against
national security through membership of a Christian organisation, collection of funds, [and]
propaganda against the Islamic Regime by helping spread Christianity in the country”.
Activists have expressed concern that Iran’s officials may backtrack on their decision to free
Pastor Fathi early. But in more good news, he was transferred on 22 June to ward 12 of
Rajaei-Shahr prison, a ward that is for political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Before
then, he had been held in ward 1 of the same prison where he was living with dangerous
criminals, contrary to Iranian prison laws on separation of criminals.
It appears that Iranian officials are making an example of Pastor Fathi, treating him with such
severity in order to dissuade other would-be converts to Christianity. Yet, despite Iran’s
persistent and brutal persecution of the country’s Christian converts, Elam Ministries reports
that, “today the most conservative estimate is that there are at least 360,000 believers in the
nation”.
Ed: Meanwhile - further developments regard Saeed Abedini, previously reported in this
newsletter
Pastor Saeed Abedini shocked with taser gun and threatened with
new charges
6th October - Church in Chains
https://barnabasfund.org/news/Pastor-Saeed-Abedini-shocked-with-taser-gun-and-threatenedwith-new-charges?audience=GB
Iranian intelligence officers subjected Pastor Saeed Abedini to an intense round of
interrogation on 22 September, in which they shocked him repeatedly with a taser gun
and threatened him with new criminal charges that could extend his eight-year
sentence.
Pastor Saeed Abedeni - Source: Church in Chains
(David Turner)
The authorities accused Pastor Abedini of having connections with anti-government groups,
and making statements and taking actions against the Iranian government, according to the
American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).
On 26 September, the pastor marked three years in prison. His wife, Naghmeh Abedini,
is concerned that Iranian officials are using the Iran-born American to gain political
advantage over the US. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said that the pastor will not be
released until the US frees 19 Iranian prisoners.
“My husband is not collateral,” said Naghmeh Abedini. “He is a father and a man who broke
no law. Yet Iran is treating him like a pawn in a game of chess.”
Pastor Abedini was arrested in September 2012 when he was visiting family in Iran. He
was found guilty of “disturbing Iran’s national security by establishing a number of
house churches” and sentenced to eight years in jail.
During his three years in prison for his faith, he has endured physical and verbal abuse,
including several beatings, but has been denied medical treatment. In June, he was
punched in the face by a group of inmates for no apparent reason.
PAKISTAN and the Paki Christian diaspora
Angry mob sets Pakistani Christian house ablaze in attempt to
burn family alive
Barnabas Fund - 01/10/2015
An angry mob locked a Christian family inside their home in Islamabad, Pakistan, and
set it on fire in an attempt the burn the family alive.
The mob arrived at the house of 38-year-old Boota Masih on 10 September and began
banging on the door and shouting for him to come out of the house. They accused Boota of
being a trespasser in his own home and demanded that he leave his house.
“I was terror stricken,” said Boota. “The mob was threatening to kill me and my family. They
had weapons in their hands and started to brandish them before me. I thought they would kill
all of us. I refused to leave my home – I had paid for it fairly and they had no right to ask me
to leave.”
Boota Masih and his wife and their six children had moved into his house only a few months
earlier. He had bought the house from Ghulam Ali for 1 million rupees (£6,200; €8,500;
US$9,500) and had made an oral agreement with two witnesses present.
When Boota refused to leave his home, the crowd began to hit him with iron rods and
wooden sticks. Then they locked the family inside a room in their house and set it on fire.
“I broke down the door using all my strength, desperate to live and to save my family,” he
said. Christian neighbours saw the fire and came to the rescue of the family. “They put out
the flames and called the fire brigade,” said Boota.
Boota Masih suspects the mob was incited by the wife of Ghulam Ali, from whom he
purchased the house. He believes they were attempting to seize his property and his land.
Although eye witnesses have reported the incident, police are so far refusing to file an
incident report (FIR). Christians living in the community are fearful of further attack.
Pakistani head teacher Saddique Azam was violently beaten by
three Muslim teachers who objected to a Christian being given
the post of head teacher.
5th October
Saddique Azam was beaten by three fellow Muslim teachers
The Muslim teachers stormed Saddique’s office just before 8 a.m. on Monday (5 October) in
Pernawa, in Pakistan’s Kasur District, and waited until he arrived. When he asked them the
purpose of their visit, they insulted him for his Christian faith and pressurised him to resign.
“You are a Christian and Choora, so how can you be Headmaster and our senior?” they asked
him. Choora is a derogatory word used to describe Christians.
They threatened him saying that if he refused to resign from the senior position he had held
for the past three months, he would have to work under their directions. They told him that, if
any of them were absent from school and were asked about their whereabouts, he must tell
the Education Department that they were with him, a local Christian told Barnabas.
When Saddique refused to comply with their demands, they began beating him, seriously
wounding his left eye. Other teachers came to Saddique’s rescue and called the police, who
arrested the three attackers.
Despite the fact that Saddique was appointed to the position of head teacher three months ago
(a position which gives him authority over three schools in the area), he is yet to receive a
formal letter of appointment from the Education Department.
Christians in Pakistan frequently endure discrimination and abuse because of their faith.
Violent attacks have become increasingly common. Earlier this year, 14-year-old Nauman
Masih died of severe burns to his body after two Muslim radicals threw kerosene on him
simply because of his Christian faith.
Thirsty Christian Accused of Blasphemy for Drinking Water
from Mosque
October 10, 2015 - by Wilson Chowdhry - BPCA
Bashiran Bibi forced to live alone since her son Aftab Gill was accused of blasphemy
A Christian family accused of blasphemy narrowly escaped an extra-judicial killing after a
Muslim lynch mob assembled to murder them.
Aftab Gill, 40, lived in Railway Colony in Wazirabad, Distt Gujranwala, and worked as a
master tailor. He has five children, three sons and two daughters. Their house is near a local
mosque and, like many other local people, they regularly drew water from the water tap
outside the mosque as no other clean water mechanism is available in the community. The
water was paid for as per the Mosque policy.
The Mosque tap where water can be bought.
On 14th August 2015, a young Muslim man named Zain Shah (18 years) from the
neighbouring village told Aftab Gill's sons, Akash (12 years) and Adnan (5 years) to convert
to Islam, but they refused. On the same day, whilst Aftab was taking water from the water tap
at the local mosque, the same man shouted at Aftab and said: "You Christians are not allowed
to take water from the mosque. If you want to drink our water you must embrace Islam and
pray regularly inside the mosque. Otherwise evil infidels defile our water taps."
A few days later Zain Shah arrived with other Muslim men and again demanded the sons to
convert to Islam. They slapped Gill's eldest son Akash who refused to convert and at that
point Aftab replied to the men, saying: "You failed to convert Baba Guru Nanak (Founder of
Sikh faith) so why pursue converting my children who follow the true and living God".
At this Zain and his friends started to beat the father and his sons, and while local police saw
the altercation and intervened, they refused to lodge an FIR against the Muslim aggravators.
Two hours later Zain and his brother visited their home accompanied by a mob of about 200
men ready to lynch the family. Thankfully a local called the police who dispersed the crowd
before any violence occurred.
Later that day a few elders from the Christian community asked police officials to accompany
them with Aftab so they could meet with the local cleric to resolve the issue. Despite the
general perception that local Muslim clerics deliver hate speeches in the mosque, this local
chief priest (Molvi) was refreshingly not of the same mind set. He assured the terrified
Christian family that he would not allow the situation to escalate, but advised that Aftab
needed to leave the village for the sake of his own and his family's future, believing this also
would reduce tension in the community. Since then Aftab and his family have moved away
from the area, leaving Aftab's distraught mother Bashiran Bibi living alone in the former
family home. She said:
"Life for Christians in Pakistan is now worse than ever: we are attacked daily and treated
worse than rats. Muslims do not want us as their neighbours because they believe we are evil
and have satanic diseases. My son and his family came close to death and we were all
terrified when the mob came to our house. I prayed to God for His protection and by His
grace we have survived, but now my children are far away from me and I am very lonely: my
tears are constant."
There was no First Investigation Report (FIR) registered at the local police station as the
issue was resolved amicably outside the criminal procedure.
There are a few other Christian families living in the same area and we are concerned for
their safety. The tensions in the community have somewhat dissipated but could erupt again
at any time as no separate safe drinking water facility exists for the Christians, requiring them
to also use the Mosque tap. The BPCA would like to install a clean water pump in the area
for this hard-pressed community and simply need to raise £750 for the installation. We hope
to install it in the local church whereby it can become a beacon of hope for our suffering
minority.
Shamim Masih said: "Living near any mosque for a Christian family in a Muslim dominated
country like Pakistan could be dangerous at any time. I had a very similar experience when I
was living in Rawalpindi and we had a rented house near a mosque. Normally during hot
summers, water levels dropped and we faced a shortage of water. People used to collect water
from the nearby mosque, paying them a small fee. I was forced to do the same and we
happily paid our contribution until one day the cleric came to know that we are from the
Christian faith. Immediately the local cleric stopped us from taking water from the mosque
which caused us great difficulty."
He added: "Later when we moved house we faced further discrimination. We saw a house for
rent and agreed terms with the owner, but when I shared I was Christian with the landlord he
refused us his house as he will not let it to a Christian. The majority of Muslims living in
rural areas of the country think that Christians are inferior and unholy people. I remember the
story of poor sister Asia Bibi who dared to drink water from the same cup as her Muslim coworker, which led to a religious debate and her being arrested for blasphemy. Now she is
suffering a life sentence in prison that may ultimately lead to her early demise."
The British Pakistani Christian Association would like to help Aftab Gill's family by
supporting them through the stressful and painful reality of being forced to leave their home
due to persecution. We would like to help them with six months rent which totals £600 and
by providing food for 6 months, which is £240. We hope that through the generosity of our
donors we can illustrate the love of God to this hurting family.
Front door of the local mosque. Aftab Gill's uncle Riaz Masih, a local cobbler, and Bashiran
Bibi
Pakistan: 23 unreported ‘blasphemy’ cases in 2 years
By Asif Aqeel World Watch Monitor - Sep. 29, 2015
Since 2013,
2013, the All Pakistan Ulema Council (APUC) has intervened in 23 incidents involving
Christians accused of blasphemy, preventing them from becoming major incidents, according
to Hafiz Tahir Mahmood Ashrafi, the APUC Chairman. (The APUC, a representative group
of senior Muslim clerics, is very influential in Pakistani public life.)
It is widely acknowledged that Pakistani Christians suffer disproportionately from abuse of
the implementation of the blasphemy laws, but this figure shows that many suffer, even if
their blasphemy accusations are never publicly recorded, or indeed ever reported.
After the violence in Joseph Colony, a Christian enclave in Lahore, in 2013, during which
about 112 houses were ransacked and set on fire by a mob of about 2,000 protestors, a large
meeting of Christian and Muslim leaders was convened and Christians were assured that
misuse of blasphemy laws would not continue.
“After that, we arranged training workshops with about 7,000 Muslim clerics who were
exposed to how the blasphemy laws could be misused,” Ashrafi told World Watch Monitor.
After a Christian couple was killed in mob violence last November in Kot Radha Kishan,
there was another plan to incite ‘blasphemy’ charges, which Ashrafi says his council
defeated. A Quran with torn pages was placed outside a local mosque to incite the crowd, so
that the police could be prevented from arresting those suspected of burning and killing the
couple.
“Similarly, in the Sheikhupura incident [in June 2015, when a Christian couple was falsely
accused of defaming Islam], one group of clerics said that a police case was to be registered,
but our clerics stood up and opposed that,” Ashrafi said.
Ashrafi’s statement has come at a time when several blasphemy cases against Christians have
emerged: the most recent an anonymous letter to a police station which proved false.
On 16 September, the head of the Gali Sardar Akhtarwali Police Station in Changa Manga,
Kasur District, received a letter saying that a Christian, Saleem Masih, was seen burning
pages of the Bible and of the Quran.
The letter alleged that the incident was witnessed by Samina Barkat, but the police said there
was insufficient evidence.
The letter apparently demanded that “voices should be raised against this ‘blasphemer’”. The
police managed to settle the matter before it spilled over into full-blown violence against
local Christians, who said the letter’s purpose was to evict them from their houses. The issue
has temporarily settled; however, they fear that violence could flare up at any time –
whenever those behind the letter find it convenient.
Parvaiz Masih
A similar incident took place in the same district
two weeks before, on 31 August, when the Christians of Garhaywala village locked
themselves in Mandi Usmanwala Police Station. About 200 local men were demanding the
public hanging of Parvaiz Masih, an illiterate Christian labourer, for his ‘blasphemous’ words
with three co-workers. The mob demanded that the father of four be handed over to them.
Two weeks earlier, on 15 August, Parvaiz Masih was working with Muhammad Amin,
Muhammad Ejaz and Muhammad Asif for Hajji Jamshed, who had tasked them to fill four
trucks of sand from a nearby dried-up canal. Working in the scorching heat, they decided to
take some rest, according to Masih’s brother-in-law, Shamoun Masih.
“One of them was repeatedly listening to a religious sermon on a cell phone, at which Parvaiz
suggested they all get back to work,” he said. “After the work was done, the three wanted to
pay Parvaiz less for his labour than had been mutually agreed. So they accused him of
blasphemy.
“For many days, there’d not been such an issue in his village. Most of the villagers initially
did not buy this accusation, but the issue was mainly whipped up by a shopkeeper,
Muhammad Sajid, who had earlier requested Christians to rent a shop to him, but they had
refused.”
In most places, Pakistani Christians’ houses are outside the main village (due to pre-Partition
residential arrangements for low castes). However, as urbanization creates new roads, the
formerly unimportant locations become expensive; they’re now right next to new roads.
“The Christians have about 20 houses on the roadside which can be used for economic
activities,” Shamoun Masih said. “That night the Christians all became so terrified that they
locked themselves in when [Sajid] led the 200 men out en masse… Police arrested some of
Parvaiz’s relatives, including me, and tortured [some] to disclose his whereabouts. Parvaiz
had actually gone to his in-laws in Viram village, about 22km from ours. Whenever he did
not have work in our village, he used to go to Viram to work as a brick kiln labourer. The
next morning, the police also went to Viram and beat up everyone in Parvaiz’s in-laws’ house
there (including women) and took them into custody, simply because Parvaiz had gone to
work.”
Hours later, Parvaiz Masih was arrested at the brick kiln, totally unaware of developments.
Though all his relatives were released after his arrest, villagers remained reluctant the
Christians for days.
“Two local Muslims, Chaudhry Majeed Kamboh and Sardar Intizar Dogar, told every villager
that they could approach (or even harm) the Christians only over their [Kamboh and Dogar’s]
dead bodies, after which no one came near them,” said Shamoun Masih.
Aftab Masih
In yet another incident, a Christian man and his family were rescued from mob justice only
through the timely intervention of Islamic clerics and local police.
Forty-year-old Aftab Masih, a father of five, was accused of speaking ill against Islam in
Wazirabad, about 100 kilometres from Lahore, on 3 July.
By evening, about 300 men, armed with sticks and other weapons, gathered outside his house
and chanted slogans. Local cleric Qari Naeem and several other Muslims intervened,
supporting police to settle the matter.
Masih, of Wazirabad Railway Colony, argued with another resident, Zain Shah, 18, after
Shah has attempted to persuade Masih’s 12-year-old son Akash and five-year-old son Adnan
to convert to Islam.
Masih told World Watch Monitor that he did not want a religious argument, but only wanted
to stop Shah from disturbing his sons. Shah is son of a retired Pakistan Railways constable,
named Safdar, who has a reputation locally for being very religious.
“I only defended my Christian faith but it was taken as blasphemy,” said Masih. “Whenever
my children went outside, Zain told them to convert to Islam.”
“I only defended my Christian faith but it was taken as blasphemy.”
--Aftab Masih
“We draw our drinking water from the nearby mosque. Zain told my children that they could
not take water until they convert to Islam; otherwise, they were defiling the taps. But
respectable Muslims said that there was no other place for them, so they could fill up with
water from here.”
Masih argued with Shah about not disturbing his sons in front of Shafqat Hussain Shah’s
shop on 29 June. “At this, Zain flared up and used inflammatory language against the
Christian faith,” he told WWM.
Tired of the repeated verbal assaults against his faith, Masih asked Shah why he should be
allowed to continue to bother his children, when Muslims had failed to convert Baba Guru
Nanak, the 16th century founder of Sikhism. This was construed as blasphemy, a charge
which in Pakistan carries the death penalty. The entire argument was witnessed by the
shopkeeper, who reprimanded Shah for using disrespectful language against Christianity.
By evening, Shah’s elder brother and father were spreading the news that Masih had
disrespected the Prophet. Safdar Shah met Masih in front of a crowd of people, where Masih
apologised. But Safdar Shah refused to accept it, saying the matter would be presented before
Hafiz Naeem, the leader of a local mosque.
The next morning, Naeem convened a meeting, where both presented their versions of events.
Naeem decided that Maish was not guilty of blasphemy.
However, Safdar Shah refused to accept this and said that he would present his case before
Asif Hazarvi, the grandson of Mohammad Abdul Ghafoor Hazarvi, a founding member of
one of Pakistan’s leading political parties, Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP).
“Safdar also said that he would not settle for anything less than retribution for blasphemy,”
Masih told World Watch Monitor. “By the evening of 2 July, several people called and said
that it was the talk of the town that my son, Aftab, had committed blasphemy. I was sitting in
my friend’s shop discussing this when about 300 chanting men, armed with sticks and other
such weapons, reached my house.”
After Muslim neighbours intervened, it was decided that the matter would be presented
before Hazarvi the next day. A Catholic priest (who requested anonymity), Safdar Shah and
dozens of his supporters, a police officer, mosque leader Naeem and the shopkeeper were all
present.
“Hazarvi asked that three from my side and three from Sadfar’s side stayed, while others
were sent out. He asked us to write down our statements. Hafiz Naeem and Shafqat Hussain
Shah acted as witnesses, while another Christian friend wrote down Masih’s statement,” said
Masih. “Hafiz Naeem testified that Masih was not the type to indulge in religious arguments,
and Shafqat Hussain Shah narrated the original discussion exactly [as he’d heard it].”
“After reading both our statements, Hazarvi said that no blasphemy had taken place and I
should not be disturbed anymore.”
“There were still dozens of men present outside, so Shafqat Hussain Shah and Hafiz Naeem
took me into their custody and took me back to my home.”
“When I reached it, a large mob was gathered outside my house. Within a short while,
another Catholic priest arrived in a car and urged me to leave.”
Since this incident, Masih has left Wazirabad and is in search of some means to support his
family.
APUC Chairman Ashrafi told World Watch Monitor his organisation also intervened in the
case.
Napoleon Qayyum, a Christian politician from the Pakistan People’s Party, said that despite
evidence that police in the Punjab province often protect Christians from communal violence,
those who have been accused of blasphemy are usually forced to relocate, leaving their
homes and families behind.
Parliamentary Written Questions:
Hansard source (Citation: HL Deb, 29 September 2015, cW)
Lord Alton: "To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the
conditions in the detention centres where Pakistani Christians are detained in Bangkok, and
whether the inmates include babies, children, lactating women and the infirm; what
international obligations exist in regard to the detention of children in such circumstances;
whether they have made representations to the UNHCR and the government of Thailand
about those conditions; and if so, what response they have received.
Baroness Anelay - Minister of State: "We have not conducted a specific assessment of the
detention centres where Pakistani Christians are detained. However, consular officials visit
prisons and Immigration Detention Centres in Bangkok regularly to carry out their consular
duties with respect to British citizens. Their assessment is that conditions are generally poor
and they are aware that women and children are also detained.
A number of international obligations exist in regard to the detention of children including
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture and
the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We have raised our concerns with the Thai
Minister for Justice and senior officials. The Thai authorities have shown themselves willing
to cooperate on work to improve prison conditions and we are ready to share our experience
and expertise. We maintain a regular dialogue with many senior prison officials to address
specific concerns.
We meet the UN High Commissioner for Refugees regularly to discuss how we can assist
their work, including around conditions of detention.
Question: 16 September 2015
Lord Alton: To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assistance they have been able to
provide for refugees fleeing persecution in Pakistan in resolving their applications for
asylum; and what is their estimate of the average time likely to elapse between an applicant
lodging a claim for asylum in Bangkok and being resettled. (HL2259)
Baroness Anelay of St Johns: We work closely with the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) in Thailand on a wide range of refugee issues. We do not intervene in
specific cases but aim to support the rights of those fleeing persecution as a whole. From our
conversations with UNHCR we understand that the time taken to assess asylum applications
in Thailand varies and can be anything from a few months to a couple of years, depending on
the individual circumstances of each case. We understand the majority of applicants from
Pakistan who seek refugee status are successful and they are then eligible for resettlement.
The time taken for resettlement varies as it is dependent on each specific situation.
Question: Lord Alton: To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their current assessment
of the number of Pakistani Christians who have fled to Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka
through fear of persecution. (HL2256)
Baroness Anelay of St Johns: We gather information on this issue from external sources
and have not conducted our own assessment of the numbers involved. We continue to urge
the Government of Pakistan to fulfil the human rights obligations set out in the Constitution
of Pakistan and international law, including those relating to religious minorities.
Question: Lord Alton
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to work with the British Council to
examine ways of assisting the children of Pakistani refugees to receive schooling and
educational opportunities while their asylum cases are being considered. (HL2260)
Baroness Anelay of St Johns: The main problem refugees face in accessing appropriate
opportunities for education in Thailand is the lack of proper documentation explaining their
status. Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on refugees, therefore any
documents provided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are not
necessarily accepted. We are working with UNHCR to support their requests to the Thai
government to develop a form of documentation for refugees. This would allow refugees to
access appropriate schooling and other opportunities. We work closely with the British
Council in Thailand and have discussed this issue with them.
Question: 17 September 2015 Lord Alton
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the findings of the
report commissioned by the British Pakistan Christian Association, entitled Education,
Human Rights Violations in Pakistan and the Scandal Involving UNHRC and Asylum Seekers
in Thailand; and whether, in the light of this report, they plan to review the risk of the
persecution of Christians in Pakistan and update their guidance document Pakistan:
Christians and Christian Converts. (HL2312)
Lord Bates: The Home Office will be considering the report commissioned by the British
Pakistani Christian Association alongside a range of other material to make a full
assessment of the situation of Christians in Pakistan, and will revise its country information
and guidance if necessary.
The Home Office considers that the treatment of asylum seekers in Thailand is primarily a
matter for the Thai authorities.
ED: good news
CALL FOR EVIDENCE ON THE TREATMENT
OF PAKISTAN'S CHRISTIANS AND OTHER MINORITIES NOVEMBER HEARINGS AT WESTMINSTER
All Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief
Parliamentary Inquiry: Call for Evidence
‘The Plight of Minority Religious or Belief Groups in Pakistan and as Refugees:
Addressing Current UK & UNHCR Policy’
Pakistan represents one of the worst situations for minority religious or belief groups around
the world and is rife with persecution on the grounds of religion or belief by both state and
non-state actors. With the current policies and laws that Pakistani officials are advancing at
both international and domestic levels, including the notorious blasphemy laws, the right of
Pakistan’s citizens to freedom of religion or belief is looking unlikely to be upheld and
protected in the near future. In addition to these concerns, the UK Home Office and UNHCR,
has, via using A UK Supreme Court Upper Tier case, determined that at least one Pakistani
religious minority’s treatment is not severe enough to grant these individuals refugee status.
While freedom of religion or belief is a protected right under international law and is a clear
basis for asylum in the 1951 Refugee Convention as well as the UK’s current vulnerability
scheme project, there remain debates in the UK and further afield as to whether all Pakistani
minority religious or belief communities’ treatment in Pakistan or abroad ‘amounts to a real
risk of persecution’.
In order to be able to look at the current UK and UNHCR policy regarding minority Pakistani
religious or belief groups and its validity, the current conditions for such groups living in
Pakistan and as refugees will need to be understood. The APPG on International Freedom of
Religion or Belief is currently calling for submissions from charities, experts, faithcommunities and individuals with personal experiences on their concerns, and suggestions
on:
·
What circumstances minority religious or belief groups living in Pakistan currently
face; both vis-à-vis State and non-State actors
·
What circumstances minority religious or belief groups having left Pakistan as
asylum seekers currently face
·
What the current UK and UNHCR policy regarding each minority Pakistani
religious or belief community is, whether changes to current policy is required and if
so, how this ought to be done
We particularly welcome testimonies from individuals who have recently sought asylum in
UK on the grounds of persecution for their faith or belief.
Each submission should be no longer than 3 pages, and clearly indicate the organisation
and/or author of the statement. The submissions will contribute to a new report written by the
APPG on the subject. The APPG can withhold the identities of authors of statements in the
report, if a request for anonymity is clearly made in the submission.
Written submissions may result in individuals or organisations being invited to give oral
testimonies at a formal hearing in the Houses of Parliament before selected parliamentarians
on 10 November (9:00 – 10:30) and 11 November (10:00 – 12:00) in Portcullis House,
Room R. The APPG holds the right to use or not to use submissions in its reporting.
Submissions should be sent to katharinee.thane@parliament.uk . The deadline for
submissions is 5pm, 3 November
Ed: another positive developmentOn October 7th the Supreme Court court in Pakistan has upheld the death sentence of a man
(Qadri) who murdered the former governor of the Punjab for seeking reforms in the
blasphemy law and for supporting Asia Bibi, a Christian woman condemned to death for
allegedly committing blasphemy.
The governor, Salmaan Taseer, was shot and killed by Mumtaz Qadri, a member of his own
security detail, in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, on 4 January, 2011. Twenty-six-year old
Qadri shot the governor 27 times without being intercepted by other police officers present at
the crime scene. Then he threw down his AK-47 sub-machine gun and reportedly pleaded to
be arrested so that he could explain his intentions.
Qadri’s appeal lawyers maintained that because the governor called the blasphemy laws a
“black law”, Qadri had the right to kill him. Supreme Court Justice Asif Saeed Khosa stated
that “criticizing blasphemy laws does not amount to committing blasphemy” and that Qadri
had no legal justification to take the law into his
NIGERIA
Sept 30th - Hansard - written questions:
Lord Alton:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of progress in combating
Boko Haram in Nigeria; what assessment they have made of how many deaths and acts of
terror that group has been responsible for over the past year; and how many of the girls who
have been abducted by Boko Haram have been rescued to date. (HL2311)
Baroness Anelay of St Johns:
While we welcome progress made by Nigeria and its neighbours, Boko Haram remains a
threat to security in North East Nigeria and the wider region. Due to the nature of Boko
Haram attacks, which often take place in remote areas, it is difficult to provide accurate and
reliable figures relating to their activities, including the numbers of people killed and
abducted. However we estimate that over 20,000 people have been killed, 2.2 million
internally displaced and 4.6 million affected by the insurgency.
We are aware of several hundred women and children being released by Boko Haram this
year. We have stressed to the Nigerian authorities the importance that they are provided with
appropriate support.
TANZANIA
Six churches torched in Tanzania
By World Watch Monitor - Sep. 30, 2015
Six churches
have been burnt down in northwest Tanzania within the past week.
First, on 23 September, three churches were torched – the Living Waters International
Church, Buyekera Pentecostal Assemblies of God, and Evangelical Assemblies of God
Tanzania churches, which are all located in the Bukoba region, on the shores of Lake
Victoria.
Then, during the night of 26 September, three more churches – also in Bukoba – were
torched: the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Kitundu Roman Catholic Church and Katoro
Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church. All are located in the Katoro region of western
Bukoba.
“The people woke up on 27th Sep to find their sanctuaries burnt down,” an anonymous
source told World Watch Monitor. “The scenarios are the same; unknown people broke in,
piled things onto the altar, poured petrol over it and set it alight. They fled before anyone
could respond and so remain unknown.”
The first fire occurred at the Living Waters
church. At around 4am local time, the pastor, Rev. Vedasto Athanas, was awakened by a
phone call from a neighbour alerting him that his church was on fire. He rushed to the scene,
but was too late to prevent the damage to hundreds of chairs, tables and benches, and the
pulpit.
Shortly afterwards, arsonists set fire to the Buyekera Pentecostal church, which is led by Rev.
Emmanuel Narsis.
About an hour later, the third church, in the nearby Kibeta neighbourhood, was torched. Its
pastor, Rev. Kabonaki, received a phone call just before 6am. He rushed to the church, but
was too late to prevent the flames from destroying the church and everything inside.
The secretary of the local pastors’ organisation, the Bukoba Pastors Fellowship, said there
have been many arson attacks in the Kagera area since 2013.
“Since 2013 we have had over 13 churches torched here in Kagera and no one has been held
accountable. This is not acceptable,” said the secretary, who wished to be known only by her
first name, Annette.
In early 2013, the church of Rev. Innocent Mzinduki was torched; in July 2013, a pastor
identified as Joyce lost her church; in September 2013, the Maruku Pentecostal Assemblies of
God Church was burned down. In early 2015, Lutheran churches in Rubale, Kyaka Mushasha
and Kagondo Muleba were torched; then in February, the Calvary Assemblies of God, Itawa
Baptist Church, Redeemed Church, Kagondo and TMRC Kyabitembe were all burned down.
“And these are not the only ones,” Annette told World Watch Monitor. “They have now
started adding fuel [paraffin or petrol] to ensure maximum damage.”
According to the secretary, a few people were arrested after the February arson incidents but
they were later released. No more investigative progress has been reported to date.
“We are very upset and concerned as this is a trend that can no longer be ignored,” she said.
“The police tell us they are investigating but we have heard no progress from investigations
of previous church arson attacks.”
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
Barnabas Fund 30/09/2015
At least 42 people have been killed and a further 80 injured in clashes after Muslims attacked
a predominantly Christian neighbourhood of Bangui, capital of Central African Republic
(CAR) on Saturday (26 September).
Over 30,000 people have fled their homes to displaced persons' camps in various parts of the
city, say some reports.
Early on Saturday morning, Muslims marched from their stronghold in Bangui’s 3rd district to
the 5th district, a mainly Christian part of the city. Carrying automatic guns, grenades,
machetes and knives, they torched houses and cars and attacked several buildings, including a
church, dispensary, police station, and the Voice of Peace Muslim radio station.
The situation, said a Barnabas contact, is one of “total carnage” and “chaos”. “The
scenes are surreal,” he said.
“Pastor Vincent cries his eyes out after his daughter and her husband had their throats
cut in their home.” “When,” he asks, “will this Calvary end for the people of CAR?”
The President of the Association of Evangelicals in CAR was one of those whose homes
were attacked. Finding that he was not at home, a group of young Muslims forced family
members to leave the house, looted its contents and burned it to the ground; no one was
injured.
The attacks were prompted by the murder of a Muslim motorcycle-taxi driver, whose body
was discovered dumped in the street, mutilated and the throat cut, according to a Barnabas
contact. Despite the fact that the murder motive is unknown, Muslims responded with what
was said to be the worst violence the country has seen this year, making Christians their
target.
Anti-balaka (meaning anti-AK47 bullets or anti-machete) fighters then responded with
reprisal attacks and the clashes have led to more looting and deaths.
Various international non-government organisation (NGO) buildings were looted on Sunday
afternoon (27 September) and anti-balaka militants attacked a police station that night,
injuring two police officers.
On Monday, many people stayed inside and most shops remained shuttered, but thousands
also took part in a march towards the presidential palace. That evening, hundreds of inmates
from Nagaragba jail escaped, many of them anti-balaka and Muslim Seleka militants. “Right
now, everyone is on tenterhooks,” said our contact.
It is unknown how many people have been killed, but a Barnabas contact has warned that the
figures could reach into the dozens, with media underestimating the situation. At least three
children are among those killed, one of them decapitated, according to UNICEF. Some
sources are reporting that over 200 people have been “executed”.
If Seleka militants, who are now mainly in the country’s interior, make it to the capital, the
fear is that the death toll will rise “on a big scale” if clashes continue, reported a Barnabas
contact.
According to a Barnabas contact, it is thought that the body of the murdered Muslim had
come from far off, and that it had been planted as a set-up in order to create trouble.
CAR authorities have blamed the clashes on citizens attempting to disrupt next month’s
elections, and on Sunday (27 September), the government enforced a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6
a.m. But the curfew is not respected and violence has continued through the evenings.
Thousands of people in this Christian-majority country have been killed in the past two
years after violent clashes erupted between Muslim Seleka groups and anti-balaka
militia in late 2013.
In February, Fulani Muslims burned more than 14 homes and churches and vandalised
missionary centres in the area around Kaga-Bandoro, in the north-central part of the country.
Everything in an area of around 5-30 kilometres was destroyed; fields and property were
either seized or ruined.
In early 2014, when the violence was at its peak, over 930,000 people were displaced from
their homes.
Although media have dubbed the anti-balaka a Christian militia, churches across CAR have
strongly condemned the group’s violent actions.
Seleka militants ousted President Francois Bozize from his position in March 2013 and took
control of the government. Mr Bozize has been exiled to Cameroon and a transitional
government led by Catherine Samba-Panza is currently running the country. Although
elections have been scheduled from 18 October, it is suspected that they will be postponed
yet again.
ETHIOPIA
Ethiopian village church attacked
By World Watch Monitor - Oct. 13, 2015
A church in a village 130km west of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, has been
attacked three times recently by suspected animists angered over their evangelism efforts.
On 30 August, a mob killed one Christian and injured around 30 others during the
Sunday service. Two days later, a day after the murdered Christian’s funeral, a
group of men strangled a female member of the congregation and left her for dead.
Then, on 27 Sep., church members were again attacked as they returned home after
church.
First attack
Witnesses said the Sunday morning service was in progress when a woman started
screaming outside the church. When the Christians rushed outside to investigate, they
discovered a group of men attacking Alem, a member of the church in her forties.
The scene quickly escalated into chaos as the attackers started assaulting other church
members. They beat men, women and children with their fists and with sticks. They also
broke chairs, windows and doors.
One of the founding members of the church, 55year-old Godana, was dragged into the church and attacked with machetes. He died
from his wounds, leaving behind a wife, Beza, and eight children.
Around 30 others were injured, although none seriously.
It took more than an hour for the police to arrive, by which time the group of about
10 attackers had left. The local Christians said the attack was premeditated because the
attackers tried to identify people from a list, which included the names of the pastor and
two evangelists. However, the pastor did not identify himself, while the two others were
not there that day.
“Some of our friends from the village were telling us to take care as rumours about secret
plans to attack us were spreading. But, we didn’t take it seriously. It is common for people
to throw stones at us, but we didn’t think the hardest was still on the way,” said one of the
church leaders.
Second attack
On the morning of 1 Sep., a day after Godana’s funeral, a group of men attacked a female
evangelist in the congregation, identified as Dinke.
At 5am, a group of unknown men knocked on her door. Everyone else at the compound
was asleep, but because she did not suspect any danger, she opened the door without
hesitation.
The men grabbed her by the neck and prevented her from calling out for help. They
dragged her to a nearby clearing and strangled her. It seems that the attackers thought
Dinke was dead when she lost consciousness, so they tied her to a tree and left, but her
brother found her and took her to hospital, where she is still recovering.
Dinke has been deeply traumatised by the event. “I don’t think I could ever think of
returning to the village,” she told visitors.
Third attack
Although church services were suspended for a few weeks, Christians resumed services
on 27 Sept. At the end of the service, church members were again attacked with machetes
and sticks as they returned home, but some of the church’s youths managed to fight off
the attackers.
Meanwhile, the family and friends of Godana are struggling to come to terms with their
loss.
His widow, Beza, told visitors she does
not know how she will be able to provide for her large family. “I suffer from
pneumonia and have been receiving treatments for many years. Godana was responsible
for everything in the house. I don’t know what I will do,” she said.
Godana’s eldest son added: “My father was a hard-working farmer. Even though I am an
adult and am working to earn my own living, my father has always helped me in the areas
where I still struggled.”
The village of Guder is situated in Oromia state. Although the Orthodox Church
dominates the area, the past few years have seen an increase in Ethiopians returning to the
traditional Wakefeta religion, after the government started encouraging Ethiopians to
return to their cultural roots. The Guder church’s successful evangelism efforts in this
region have previously invited insults and threats against its members.
SUDAN
The Archbishop of Sudan, part of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan, has
been awarded this year’s Pro Fide award (Latin for “For Faith”) by the Finnish based
religious liberty group Friends of the Martyred Church.
Archbishop Ezekiel Kondo travelled to Finland last month to receive the award and to
give a speech entitled "the Suffering Church’s message for us."
“I am very much honoured to receive this award from you,” Archbishop Kondo said.
“This Award is not only to me but it is for all the faithful Sudanese Pastors who work in a
very difficult situations and some with no salary!
“It is for the Pastors who followed their flocks to Diaspora. It is for those children being
bombed in Nuba Mountains & Blue Nile and women being raped in Darfur. It is for the
Sudanese refugees across the world.
“It is my prayer that peace with justice will reign in Sudan and South Sudan.”
The award was presented by Johan Candelin, the founder and chairman of the Friends of
the Martyred Church organisation. The organisation has 6,000 supporters and is active in
30 countries across the world speaking out for the persecuted church.
EGYPT
At Least 7 Christians Injured in Attack on Christians in Upper
Egypt
10/08/2015 Washington, D.C. (International Christian Concern) International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that at least seven individuals and two
homes were attacked in the latest round of violence against Christians in Upper Egypt.
What, in a normal setting, would have been a conflict between school children, escalated
to an attack by a large crowd on Christians who are frustrated again with the lack of
protection from security officials.
According to ICC's sources, Ahmed Maher Mekhimer, a Muslim student in grade 8 used
to bully a Christian student called Amgad Emad Zikry. Then last week, Amgad's cousin,
Youssef Talaat Ayad, stood up for his cousin and this was what sparked a wave of
violence that swept Kom El Raheb village in Samalout, Minya.
On Monday October 5th after the school day finished around 4:00 p.m., a group of men
from the El Feema family attacked the home of Talaat Ayad, Youssef's father. The group
was comprised of as many as 200, Father Istaphanos Shehata said in a radio interview.
These were details that Father Sarophim, a priest of the Virgin Mary Church in Abo
Sidhom, confirmed in an interview with ICC.
The attacked started with Talaat's Stationary and Grocery store, located on the first floor
of the family home. They looted the store and caused major destruction. Talaat's hand
was broken by the men at the store. The mob then tried to break into the house but they
could not get through the iron gate, so they approached from the back and climbed a
short wall into the house. They then attacked Youssef and old brother, Ishak, age 18,
leaving them wounded with several bruises. Talat's wife, Sameeha, was also injured with
a cut to the head. She was later taken to the hospital where she would need five stitches
to close the wounds.
The crowd then left and headed to the home of Amgad. Amgad was not there, but his
mother and two others were injured, including his cousin Emad, who had a fractured
skull and leg as a result of the attacks.
"After the victims arrived at the hospital the police and someone from the District
Attorney's office came to take their statements as a standard procedure," Father
Sarophim, told ICC. "But no arrest warrant was issued, even though the criminals are
known to everybody... As usual the police dealt with the situation with apathy."
The families were preparing to leave the village when, after numerous requests from the
Bishopric of Samalout, the security forces sent a small group of officers to maintain the
calm in the village.
This is at least the third incident of attacks on Christians in villages in Samalout in the
past month.
Todd Daniels, Regional Manager for the Middle East said, "Again we are learning of
violence against the Christian community in Upper Egypt and again we are hearing of
the absence of protection from the security forces or punishment for those responsible.
Officials in Egypt must urgently take necessary steps to ensure that all Egyptians including Christians - have their basic rights protected. The government of President AlSisi needs to demonstrate genuine leadership that goes beyond mere words in protecting
the Christian citizens of Egypt."
USA
Oregon college shooting: Gunman 'targeted Christians'
BBC News
The gunman who killed nine people and wounded seven others in Oregon had targeted
Christians, the father of one of the victims says.
Named as Chris Harper Mercer, the gunman opened fire on Thursday inside a classroom at
Umpqua Community College.
Thirteen weapons were recovered, six at the school and seven at his home, the police said.
All were bought legally.
Mercer had body armour, three pistols and a rifle when he was shot and killed by police
officers after a gun battle.
On Friday, US President Obama repeated his calls for Congress to toughen up the gun laws.
And he urged the public to apply pressure to their local politicians.
"You have to make sure that anybody who you are voting for is on the right side of this
issue."
Earlier, Stacy Boylan, whose daughter survived the shooting, told US television network
CNN that his daughter described to him how the gunman asked his victims to state their
religion before shooting them.
"'Are you a Christian?' he would ask them, 'and if you are a Christian stand up,'" the father
recalled.
Mr Boylan said the gunman told the victims: "because you're a Christian you're going to see
God in just about one second".
Another student who survived the shooting, Kortney Moore, gave a similar account to a local
newspaper, The News-Review.
IDEOLOGICAL MATTERS
Fear and Loathing Stalk the West
By Samuel Gregg -American Spectator - 5th October
http://www.aina.org/news/2015005140205.htm
Civilizations come and civilizations go. While some prove capable of inner renewal, there's no
guarantee that any given culture will maintain itself over long periods of time. Today we
continue to admire the achievements of Greece and Rome. As distinct living cultures, however,
they've been dead for centuries.
Many of us think of civilizational failure in terms of a society's inability to withstand sudden
external encounters. The sun-worshiping human-sacrificing slave-owning Aztec world, for
instance, quickly crumbled before Hernando Cortez, a handful of Spanish conquistadors, and
his native allies, and, perhaps above all, European-borne diseases. Given enough violence,
superior technology, and the will to use it, an entire culture can be seriously destabilized, if not
swept aside. Yet ever since Edward Gibbon's multi-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, it's been impossible to downplay the role of internal vicissitudes in facilitating
civilizational degeneration.
More than one person, I suspect, has been wondering lately about this issue of civilizational
decline with regard to the West. Whether it's Planned Parenthood's diabolical activities,
America's de facto capitulation to Iran, Western governments' failure to eradicate the cancer
that is ISIS, or the same governments' general unwillingness to overhaul their dysfunctional
welfare systems, it's harder and harder to deny that something deeper is seriously awry.
We often conceptualize such subterranean shifts as institutional problems. The visible
deterioration of rule of law in America and Western Europe is one such example. But while
these matter, it's arguable that more primordial forces are at work. In the West's case, the
first may be summed up in one word: fear.
The fear presently haunting the West manifests itself in many forms. Numerous opinion-polls
underscore, for instance, that Americans are worried that their children won't enjoy the same
living-standards that they have. Many Europeans are apprehensive about the Muslim minorities
that live in their midst, and angst about some such Muslims' embrace of jihadist ways.
Fear makes people do strange things. It persuades some to applaud the populist offerings of a
Donald Trump. Others engage in denial by repeating, mantra-like, that all cultures are equally
valuable and there's nothing to worry about. But if there's anything redeemable about the
societies created by Marxism, National Socialism, Maoism, or Islamic jihadism, it's not
obvious to me.
Yet others respond to the prevailing unease by insisting that the appropriate response is moreof-the-same. This was on full-display in a recent address by the president of the European
Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. After conceding the EU's ineptness in the face of serious
external and internal challenges, Juncker insisted that the solution was "more Europe" (code
for more top-down direction by Europe's largely-unaccountable political class and even less
accountable bureaucracies) and "solidarity" (which, practically-speaking, amounts to the same
thing in most European politicians' minds).
And, yes, fear often causes people to identify particular groups as somehow responsible
for everyone else's problems. The renascent anti-Semitism that increasingly pollutes many
European societies is perhaps the most visible instance of this. As Walter Russell Mead recently
observed, "Countries where Jews are uncomfortable are places where a lot of other things are
going seriously wrong."
Closely associated with fear's role in the West's internal corrosion is the problem of selfloathing. It's hardly a secret that many professors in contemporary Western universities
have been inculcating students in rather negative views of Western culture for several
generations. Prominent examples include the casual dismissal of America's Founders as whitemale-slave-owners, and the insistence that profound institutional successes such as
constitutionalism are "bourgeois-constructs" that merely legitimize systematic injustices. Then
there are the efforts to "de-Westernize" educational curricula. One recent (failed) attempt was
that of France's Socialist Education Minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, to discourage highschool students from learning Latin, ancient Greek, or German, while simultaneously forcing
them to study Islamic history.
Every society needs to be self-critical if it is to confess to serious evils and avoid repeating
mistakes. For the West, slavery (hardly an exclusively Western phenomenon) is a clear
example. Acknowledging such facts, however, is quite different from denigrating Western
civilization as one long history of oppression.
There's also no good reason to actively ignore the West's historical accomplishments. These
range from the aforementioned rule of law to the development of history's greatest povertyreducing machine (otherwise known as the market economy), the music of Mozart, the
enhancement of the scientific method, and technologies that have eradicated diseases that once
limited average lifespans to 30 years of age. To say that such undertakings occurred in the West
is simply the truth. It doesn't amount to belittling other societies.
Antipathy towards a culture by its direct beneficiaries doesn't, however, just happen. It's
invariably fuelled by self-doubt. In the West's case, this particularly concerns two factors
that decisively shaped its very being. The first concerns religion.
Christianity is the faith to which most Westerners (at least nominally) adhere. And while its
history contains many shameful episodes, Christianity also exerted a decisive influence upon
the West by synthesizing Jewish wisdom, Roman law, and Greek philosophy. Unfortunately
in our own time, most of the West's senior Christian leaders seem reticent to talk about
Judeo-Christian contributions to Western civilization, save in the vaguest terms.
Leaving aside the sentimentalism that inevitably flows from their habitual separation of
compassion from reason, many such religious leaders appear quite anxious to address
topics about which they have no particular expertise qua religious leaders. Perhaps this
comes from wanting to be "relevant." But when the desire to be relevant or a "player"
in Brussels or Washington, D.C. makes religious leaders reticent to speak about (or
apparently embarrassed by) their faith's core teachings, it's often symptomatic of an
inner ambiguity about whether they believe that faith is true.
Related to this is the manifest doubt throughout the West concerning the value of a second
major influence upon its development: i.e., the seventeenth and eighteenth century
Enlightenments and modernity more generally.
You can find widespread anti-modernity sentiment across the current political spectrum.
It ranges from a type of radical traditionalist who yearns for guilds and small villages to the
far-more numerous environmental activists proclaiming imminent apocalyptic doom. What
such disparate groups often share is a somewhat romantic view of the pre-modern Western
world, and a consequent predisposition to forget -- or not care -- that, for all their undoubted
strengths, life for millions of people in pre-modern societies was also, to cite Hobbes, "poor,
nasty, brutish and short."
Not everything that flowed from the different Enlightenments was sweetness-and-light. Their
tendency to encourage hyper-specialization in the pursuit of knowledge, for example, helps
explain why many contemporary economists apparently possess a freshman's knowledge of
philosophy, while some philosophers appear oblivious to Adam Smith's most basic insights.
Likewise, the reduction of all forms of rationality to empirical reason is just one instance of
philosophies taking a powerful tool and making the serious mistake of absolutizing it. But
neither Promethean exaggerations of the possibilities opened up by modern technology and
economic creativity, nor techno-utopian tendencies to invest all one's hopes in such things, are
reasons to be flippant about the genuine moral and material benefits realized through
modernity.
Of course, it's quite possible for societies to be materially prosperous but culturally adrift. And
that's precisely where the West finds itself. Economically speaking, it remains extremely welloff. Nevertheless, the West has rarely appeared more uncertain of itself and the worth of its
patrimony. But when the historian Arnold Toynbee observed that "civilizations die from
suicide, not by murder," he didn't just mean that the most serious threats come from within. His
deeper point was that redeeming a civilization is largely a question of will.Upon that everfaltering will, it seems, the West's long-term fate presently rests.
The Crisis in International Religious Freedom
By David Corey
http://www.firstthings.com
Posted 2015-10-06 23:32 GMT
In September of this year, Baylor University sponsored two lectures on the topic of religious
persecution. The presenters were former congressman Frank Wolf (now the Jerry and Susie
Wilson Chair of Religious Freedom at Baylor) and Princeton Professor Robert P. George, who
currently serves as the Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
(USCIRF). Together they detailed a serious crisis. Religious persecution is spiralling out of
control in countries around the world while Americans seem dangerously unaware or
unconcerned.
Addressing thirty-eight undergraduates in a class on religious liberty, Mr. Wolf described the
enormity of what ISIL has been doing in Iraq. "More biblical activity took place in Iraq than in
any other region of the world," noted Wolf. He went on to point out that Abraham's homeland
was Iraq (ancient Nazaria) and that Iraq is also the site of Ezekiel's burial place. In a diabolically
symbolic gesture in July of 2014, ISIL deliberately bombed the tomb of Jonah in an effort to
erase the region's religiously diverse history.
Unfortunately, ISIL is succeeding in its attempts to stamp out the region's Judeo-Christian
heritage. According to Wolf, there were roughly 150,000 Iraqi Jews in 1950. Today there are
fewer than ten--a shocking statistic in its own right, but also an ominous sign in light of an old
regional saying: "as go the Jews, so go the Christians." Indeed, ISIL has its own version of that
saying: "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people." In other words, ISIL is
systematically expelling, converting, or exterminating two ancient faiths in sequential order.
Christians in Iraq numbered 1.5 million in 2003, Wolf observed, but that number has now fallen
to approximately 200,000.
In neighboring Syria, where the al-Assad regime has for the past four years been massacring
Sunni Muslims, ISIL has moved into the vacuum to target all religions that oppose their radical
ideology, including Alawites, Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, and Christians. Observers estimate that
more than half of Syria's pre-conflict population has now been displaced or exterminated.
And earlier this year in Libya, ISIL beheaded twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians in a
symbolic act of anti-Christian terror. Wolf took pains to stress that these are not random acts
of violence, but a "deliberate campaign of genocide," and that Christians are in fact on the
"edge of extinction" in the region where Christianity originated.
Professor Robert George's talk in the majestic Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor
summarized the 2015 annual report of the United States Commission on Religious Freedom.
That report identifies 17 "Countries of Particular Concern" (CPCs), where religious persecution
is especially severe. In last year's report the number of CPCs was only nine: Burma, China,
Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The
Commission still regards those countries as CPCs, but has now added eight more: Central
African Republic, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. Space does
not permit an account of the atrocities occurring in the countries on the Commission's list, but
the full report (quite readable and informative) is available online here and Professor George's
talk itself is available here.
The vital question is why the number of countries committing and supporting religious
persecution is growing so rapidly. The number of CPSs has nearly doubled in a year. What lies
behind this startling trend?
This question was posed to Professor George from the audience after his talk, and he did his
best to address it, though he acknowledged its complexity. His answer was that liberal
democracies in the 20th century left something undone when they defeated the oppressive
ideological regimes of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and eventually Soviet
Communism. They defeated the powers but failed to defeat ideology itself. The word
"ideology" in this context refers to a comprehensive worldview that attempts to explain and
justify mass violence in the name of bringing about a more perfect world. But like a hydra with
many regenerating heads, ideology is capable of recreating itself in new guises. The crisis, then,
stems from the world's failure to understand and prevent the ideological impulse, according to
George.
Interestingly, Mr. Wolf was asked the same question: "Why is religious persecution on the rise
around the world?" His answer was that during the era of Presidents Carter and Reagan, the
U.S. government made human rights abuses a centerpiece of American diplomacy, often
demanding progress on human rights as a condition of any "deal" with the U.S. But today things
are quite different. Wolf mentioned the looming nuclear deal between the United States and
Iran, a deal that requires nothing from Iran with respect to its ongoing practices of religious
persecution. He likewise referenced American diplomacy with China, claiming that we fail to
use their human rights violations as a bargaining chip at the negotiating table--even though
Chinese government officials routinely violate human rights laws to which China is a signatory.
Mr. Wolf's view, then, is that the failure of the United States to stand up for religious freedom
around the world creates a tacit incentive for radical groups to commit crimes against religious
believers. The groups are able to convince themselves (correctly) that no one will stop them.
But whatever the causes of the rise of persecution around the world, Mr. Wolf and Professor
George both expressed alarm that Americans are unaware and unconcerned about the issue. If
Americans do not care about the state of religious liberty around the world, neither will their
government, nor will the leaders of other nations. Americans have historically been the most
outspoken proponents of religious liberty in modern history. Should we fall silent now, either
out of ignorance or apathy, the effects will be disastrous. This is what the sudden spike in
religious persecution around the world already suggests. Unfortunately, matters can get much
worse.
David Corey is associate professor of political philosophy at Baylor University.
Iraqi Ayatollah: 'Abducting Women' and 'Destroying Churches'
is 'Real Islam'
By Raymond Ibrahim 15th October Frontpage Magazine
http://www.aina.org/news/20151015145415.htm
During a recent televised interview with Grand Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi, the
leading Shia cleric of Iraq made clear why Islam and the rest of the world can never
peacefully coexist.
First he spent some time discussing "defensive jihad," saying that all capable Muslims are
obligated to fight for the "liberation" of "occupied" territory, for instance, Israel but also
Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Ukraine,
Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, and parts of Russia.
He then explained "offensive jihad," Islam's primary bloodline, which forged what we now
call the "Muslim world" over the centuries.
According to the ayatollah, when they can--when circumstance permits it, when they are
strong enough--Muslims are obligated to go on the offensive and conquer non-Muslims
(a fact to be kept in mind as millions of Muslim "refugees" flood the West).
The Muslim cleric repeatedly yelled at the secularized host who kept interrupting him
and protesting that Islam cannot teach such intolerance. At one point, he burst out: "I am
the scholar of Islam [al-faqih]. You are just a journalist. Listen to me!"
Expounded Al-Baghdadi:
If they are people of the book [Jews and Christians] we demand of them the jizya--and if
they refuse, then we fight them. That is if he is Christian. He has three choices: either
convert to Islam, or, if he refuses and wishes to remain Christian, then pay the jizya [and
live according to dhimmi rules].
But if they still refuse--then we fight them, and we abduct their women, and destroy their
churches--this is Islam!... Come on, learn what Islam is, are you even a Muslim?!
As for the polytheists [Hindus, Buddhists, etc.] we allow them to choose between Islam
and war! This is not the opinion of Ahmad al-Husseini al-Baghdadi, but the opinion of all
five schools of jurisprudence [four Sunni and one Shia].
Towards the end of the interview, because the clean-shaven, suit-and-tie-wearing host kept
protesting that this cannot be Islam, the ayatollah burst out, pointing at him with contempt and
saying, "Who are you? You're going to tell me what to believe? This is the word of Allah!"
Indeed. Not only is it the word of Islam's deity, but it is the fundamental, insurmountable
obstacle for peace between Muslims and non-Muslims. Al-Baghdadi--and the countless
other Muslim clerics, Sunni and Shia, that hold these views--are not "radicals." For offensive
jihad is no less codified than, say, Islam's Five Pillars, which no Muslim rejects.
The Encyclopaedia of Islam's entry for "jihad" states that the "spread of Islam by arms is a
religious duty upon Muslims in general ... Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world
is under the rule of Islam ... Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad
can be eliminated."
Islam has yet to "completely be made over."
Renowned Muslim historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) explained jihad as follows:
In the Muslim community, jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the
Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by
force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the jihad was not a
religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. But Islam is under obligation to gain
power over other nations.
Here it's worth noting that even the most offensive jihad is seen as an "altruistic" endeavor, not
unlike the "white man's burden" of the 19th century. After all, the ancient argument that "we
must reform your ways, with our ways, for your own good" has been one of the most cited
justifications for offensive jihad since the 7th century.
Indeed, soon after the death of Islam's prophet Muhammad (634), when his jihadis burst out of
the Arabian peninsula, a soon-to-be conquered Persian commander asked the invading
Muslims what they wanted. They reportedly replied as follows:
Allah has sent us and brought us here so that we may free those who desire from servitude to
earthly rulers and make them servants of Allah, that we may change their poverty into wealth
and free them from the tyranny and chaos of [false] religions and bring them to the justice of
Islam. He has sent us to bring his religion to all his creatures and call them to Islam. Whoever
accepts it from us will be safe, and we shall leave him alone; but whoever refuses, we shall
fight until we fulfill the promise of Allah.
Fourteen hundred years later, in March 2009, Saudi legal expert Basem Alem publicly echoed
this view:
As a member of the true religion [Islam], I have a greater right to invade [others] in order
to impose a certain way of life [according to Sharia], which history has proven to be the best
and most just of all civilizations. This is the true meaning of offensive jihad. When we wage
jihad, it is not in order to convert people to Islam, but in order to liberate them from the dark
slavery in which they live.
Even al-Qaeda partially justified its jihad against America for being "a nation that exploits
women like consumer products"; for not rejecting the "immoral acts of fornication,
homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury."
If the "white man's burden" was/is to "civilize" Muslims, by bringing them "democracy,"
"human rights," and "secularism," the "Muslim man's burden"--captured by Allah's word to
Muslims, "Jihad is ordained for you, though you dislike it" (Koran 2:216)--has long been
to "civilize" Westerners by bringing them under the umbrella of Sharia.
This positive interpretation of jihad ensures that, no matter how violent and ostensibly unjust
a jihad is, it will always be vindicated in Muslim eyes: the ugly means will be justified by the
"altruistic" ends.
Finally, as Grand Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi pointed out, the need for Muslims to wage
offensive jihad "is not the opinion of Ahmad al-Husseini al-Baghdadi... This is the word of
Allah!" Nor is it the "opinion" of ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr, al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri,
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, or any of the other countless past and present jihadis.
No, jihad to conquer and bring Sharia to non-Muslims is the command of Allah.
Aid agencies which specifically benefit Christians:
Assyrian Church of the East Relief Organisation: http://theacero.org/
Aid to the Church in Need: http://www.acnuk.org/
Barnabas Fund: http://barnabasfund.org/UK/
Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA): http://www.cnewa.org/
Disciple Nations Alliance - http://www.disciplenations.org
Flame International: http://www.flameinternational.org/
Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East: http://frrme.org/
Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART): www.hart-uk.org
Iraqi Christians in Need: http://www.icin.org.uk/
British Pakistani Christian Association - http://www.britishpakistanichristians.org/
Open Doors: http://www.opendoorsuk.org/
Release International: http://www.releaseinternational.org
Release Eritrea - http://release-eritrea.com/
Non-Christian-specific Aid Agencies
Christian Aid: http://www.christianaid.org.uk/index.aspx
Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) - http://www.dec.org.uk/
Embrace: http://www.embraceme.org/
IsrAId: http://www.israaid.co.il/
Save the Children –: http://www.savethechildren.org.uk
Shelterbox: http://www.shelterbox.org/
Tear Fund: http://www.tearfund.org/
UNHCR / DFID - http://www.unhcr.org.uk/
Unicef: http://www.unicef.org.uk
Christian Advocacy groups
Awareness Foundation - http://www.awareness-foundation.co.uk/
British Pakistani Christian Association - http://www.britishpakistanichristians.org/
Centre for Legal Aid, Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS) - http://www.claasfamily.com
Christian Solidarity Worldwide: http://www.csw.org.uk/home.htm
Christian Solidarity International: http://csi-usa.org/index.html
Christian Freedom International: http://www.christianfreedom.org/
Church in Chains - http://www.churchinchains.ie/
CNEWA - http://www.cnewa.org/home.aspx?ID=26&pagetypeID=12&sitecode=CA
Faith Freedom - http://www.ncfpeace.org/drupal/index.php
International Christian Concern: http://www.persecution.org
International Justice Mission: https://ijm.org/
Stand with Iraqi Christians - http://www.standwithiraqichristians.org/
The Voice of the Martyrs: http://www.persecution.com/
222 Ministries International: http://www.222ministries.org/
Wazala.org - http://www.wazala.org/
WorldWatch Monitor - https://www.worldwatchmonitor.org/
Non-Christian-Specific Advocacy groups
Anglican Alliance - http://www.anglicanalliance.org/