Syria’s Christians – who will help them?
Syria’s Christians –
who will help them?
By Lela
Gilbert
Published January 21, 2014
FoxNews.com
It all started during the early days of the Arab Spring -- another “peaceful” protest defying another despotic regime. Today, nearly three years later, that protest has exploded into Syria’s ferocious civil war.
Radicalized Sunni warriors have swept across the borders, seized control of moderate forces, and are waging jihad against Iran-backed President Bashar Assad and his Shia fighters.
News reports have grown increasingly horrific: Massacres. Chemical weapons. “Barrel bombs” designed to mutilate. “Infidels” beheaded on YouTube videos. The U.N. has given up trying to accurately update the death toll, which has soared beyond 100,000.
And in the midst of widespread butchery, Syria’s ancient Christian community is being devastated.
Just days ago, Investors Business Daily
reported, "the relentless carnage and horror that has engulfed Syria over
the past two and a half years has taken a particularly heavy toll on the
country’s Christian minority. An unknown number of civilians, including
religious figures, have been kidnapped or killed or remain missing, in a
conflagration that seems to have no end…."Friday, my friend Judy Feld Carr emailed me. “I cannot understand,” she wrote, “why there is not one word in the media about the destruction of the churches in Syria
.
Nobody even mentions it!”Judy Feld Carr knows more than her share about dangers emanating from Damascus, and about how an historic population’s way of life can be annihilated. Besides the torture, murder, or flight of thousands of 20th Century Syrian Jews, most of their synagogues, sacred books and millennia of their history are lost forever.
Carr also knows something about activism. Over the course of 30 years, she all but single-handedly smuggled, ransomed or otherwise snatched 3,228 Syrian Jews out of Hafez al-Assad’s iron fist.
Long before the Internet, she tracked down and telephoned courageous rabbis; hid coded messages in books, and identified urgently at-risk Jews. Gradually, Carr raised enough money to ransom them – usually one or two at a time.
Judy Feld Carr’s story is heroic
– she deserves far more accolades than she has received. And her concern for
Syria’s Christians is genuine. Like many other Jews, she asks why their plight
is met with near-complete silence and inaction by Western Christians. Mass graves have been found in Christian villages. Priests and clergy have been abducted, tortured and murdered. A dozen nuns from the battered Christian village of Ma’alula are still held captive, while their surviving co-believers remain hidden away from the fierce gaze of the “freedom fighters.”
Radical Islam’s hatred of Jews and Christians has long been inscribed in blood across the Muslim world. Today it continues to be writ large in Syria.
Chatter about peace continues, but nothing changes. Geneva II, scheduled for January 22, offers vague possibilities for a truce, but brutality continues to pound the Syrian people into submission or worse.
In October, Nina Shea quoted
Syriac Orthodox archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, "We have shouted to
the world but no one has listened to us. Where is the Christian conscience?
Where is human consciousness? Where are my brothers? I think of all those who
are suffering today in mourning and discomfort: We ask everyone to pray for
us."The archbishop’s cry stirs many of us, including Judy Carr. In an interview about the ongoing violence in Syria, she remarked, “Thank God, there are hardly any Jews left there [to kill or torment]. The Christians are next.”
As the saying goes, "First the Saturday People, then the Sunday people."
Of course nowadays, smuggling Christians out of Syria isn’t the answer – hundreds of thousands have already fled, some barely surviving in squalid refugee camps.
Still it bears repeating that not so long ago, one determined woman – a Canadian housewife, mother and music teacher – took action, engaged others, and turned a deadly tide. If Judy Feld Carr could rescue more than 3,000 endangered Jews, what about us?
There are millions of believing Christians in the world. Perhaps together we can awaken dozing Christian leadership. Pound on political doors. Publicly protest. Inform each other. Broadcast the story. Support responsible relief efforts. Watch and pray.
Suppose every Christian took action to help our brothers and sisters in Syria. What might happen?
Lela Gilbert is author of "Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner" and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of "Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians." She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website: www.lelagilbert.com.
Christians killed for faith nearly doubled in 2013, group finds
By Joshua Rhett Miller, Published January 10, 2014, FoxNews.com
Rev. Faye Pama Musa knew immediately why suspected Boko Haram militants burst into his home last year as his wife prepared dinner in the family’s northeastern Nigeria home. His stance against Christian persecution in the divided African nation had long made him a target.
Musa, who served as the general overseer of the Rhema Assembly International Church and secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Borno, saw the intruders near the front door of his home in Maiduguri as his wife, Mercy, prepped food. One of the couple’s daughters, Zion, had spotted the armed men just seconds earlier jumping a fence.
“Today you are a dead man,” one of the gunmen reported said on May 14 as he dragged Musa to the porch. “Call your Jesus to help you, Mr. CAN man!”
Zion Musa then begged the attackers to spare her father, a request met with a misfired bullet that caused her to faint. She survived but her 52-year-old father – a man who worked closely with Open Doors, a nondenominational group tracking persecuted Christians worldwide – did not.
Musa, according to the group, was one of 2,123 Christians killed last year due to their faith, compared to 1,201 in 2012. More than half of those reported killings (1,213) occurred in Syria, followed by Nigeria (612) and Pakistan (88).
But North Korea — a country of more than 24 million, with an estimated 300,000 Christians — remained the most dangerous country worldwide for Christians for the 12th consecutive year, followed by Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
“Like others in that country, Christians have to survive under one of the most oppressive regimes in contemporary times,” according to a release on the report issued Wednesday. “They have to deal with corrupt officials, bad policies, natural disasters, diseases and hunger. On top of that, they must hide their decision to follow Christ. Being caught with a Bible is grounds for execution or a life-long political prison sentence. An estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Christians live in concentration camps, prisons and prison-like circumstances under the regime of leader Kim Jong-Un.”
A sub-Saharan African country — Somalia — was ranked second on the organization’s list for the first time. Islamic extremism is the primary source of Christian persecution in the country of more than 10 million and while the capital of Mogadishu is under more moderate Muslim control recently, converts from Islam are threatened with execution, sometimes by the al-Shabaab militant rebels.
“In Somalia, a Christian cannot trust anyone,” one Christian reportedly told an Open Doors researcher. “One false confidence and you literally lose your head.”
Syria, meanwhile, which had not previously cracked the group’s list of top ten most oppressive places for Christians, ranked third last year. Like in Somalia, Islamic extremism powered the prosecution, according to Open Door officials, and many towns that previously had large populations of Christians have become ghost towns.
“The face of persecution in Syria has changed,” the group’s World Watch List reads, adding that nearly half of rebels in Syria have a jihadist background. “The influence of these groups that are linked to Al Qaeda and other extremist factions has risen considerably in the past year.”
More than 80 percent of people worldwide identify with a religious group, according to 2011 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Of those, 2.2 billion, or 32 percent, identified themselves as Christians, followed by 1.6 billion Muslims (23 percent) and 1 billion Hindus (15 percent).
The survey also found that roughly 1.1 billion people, or 16 percent worldwide, have no religious affiliation, making that segment the third-largest religious group globally and roughly equal in size to the world’s Catholic population.
Terrorists do not come from impoverished uneducated backgrounds by Michelle Malkin
The myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist never dies. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is the latest Obama administration official to peddle this odious narrative. Cue John Lennon's cloying "Imagine," don your plaid pajamas, and curl up with a warm cup of deadly naivete.While meeting with Catholic Church officials at the Vatican in Rome on Monday, Kerry expounded on their "huge common interest in dealing with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism or even the root cause of the disenfranchisement of millions of people on this planet." In other words: If only every al-Qaida and Taliban recruit had a fraction of Kerry's $200 million fortune, they'd all be frolicking peacefully with infidels on jet skis sporting "Coexist" bumper stickers. This wasn't a one-off. Kerry delivered a similar Kumbaya-style discourse at the Global Counterterrorism Forum last fall: "Getting this right isn't just about taking terrorists off the street. It's about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment." Naturally, the Foggy Bottom apple doesn't fall far from the Pennsylvania Avenue terror-excusing tree. President Obama subscribes to the very same "midnight basketball" theory of counterterrorism. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Obama asserted that jihad "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."The chronic cluelessness of the root-cause apologists of jihad never ceases to amaze. Britain's MI5 reported in 2011 that two-thirds of the U.K's jihad suspects were from middle-class backgrounds, "showing there is no simplistic relationship between poverty and involvement in Islamist extremism." Thorough reviews of the empirical evidence shows, as the RAND Corporation reported, that "(t)errorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds."Here's a refresher cheat sheet:—9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta went to Hamburg University to study urban planning.—Convicted al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani who studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.—Osama bin Laden did a summer school stint at Oxford.—Christmas Day underwear bomb operative Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab was an elite Nigerian engineering student who studied at one of Britain's leading universities and "lived a gilded life."—Jihadist Samantha Lewthwaite, the notorious "White Widow" British Muslim convert linked to last year's Westgate mall massacre in Nairobi, was the daughter of a soldier and a former University of London student.—British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a London School of Economics student, was convicted of abducting and murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl.—Seven upper-middle-class jihadi doctors were implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings.—Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri didn't need more education or wealth to steer him away from Islamic imperialism. He had a medical degree. So did former Hamas biggie Abdel al-Rantissi.—Al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed attended Chowan College in Murfreesboro, N.C., and then transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he earned his degree in mechanical engineering along with 30 other Muslims. Mohammed applied his Western learning to oversee the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot (six Americans dead), the U.S.S. Cole attack (17 American soldiers dead) and the September 11 attacks (3,000 dead). He also has been linked to the 1998 African embassy bombings (212 dead, including 12 Americans), the plot to kill the pope, the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl and the Bali nightclub bomb blast that killed nearly 200 tourists, including two more Americans.Osama bin Laden, of course, was dedicated to spending every last penny of his inherited Saudi fortune — estimated at between $50 million and $300 million — to wage war on the West. Al-Shabaab jihadists have amassed their own terror campaign chest through the illegal ivory trade.Privileged jihad funders from Qatar and other Gulf states heap their petro-dollars on al-Qaida. The Taliban raised $400 million in one year, according to a 2012 U.N. report, not just from opium, but largely from "donations, taxing local economies and extorting money from such targets as drug dealers, cellphone operators and aid projects." Indeed, since 2006, "the Taliban have managed to finance an ever-increasing number of attacks, reflecting a year-on-year increase in income," the U.N. report said.Memo to stupidly rich elitist John Kerry, richly stupid progressive Barack Obama and the administration's bleeding-heart bureaucrats in a bubble: Financial bankruptcy is not, and has never been, the "root cause" of Koran-inspired hatred and violence against nonbelievers. Lack of intellectual stimulation is not, and has never been, the "root cause" of radical Islam's centuries-old and never-ceasing imperative to establish a worldwide caliphate and conquer the West. The root cause of civilizational jihad is unmitigated evil and arrogance, not lack of compassion, understanding or social justice.Islamic terrorism never had such dutiful tools as the American fools who rationalize it. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/michelle-malkin/john-kerry-jihad-coddler#sthash.uVUxQ2Em.dpuf
Syria’s Christians – who will help them?
Syria’s Christians –
who will help them?
By Lela
Gilbert
Published January 21, 2014
FoxNews.com
It all started during the early days of the Arab Spring -- another “peaceful” protest defying another despotic regime. Today, nearly three years later, that protest has exploded into Syria’s ferocious civil war.
Radicalized Sunni warriors have swept across the borders, seized control of moderate forces, and are waging jihad against Iran-backed President Bashar Assad and his Shia fighters.
News reports have grown increasingly horrific: Massacres. Chemical weapons. “Barrel bombs” designed to mutilate. “Infidels” beheaded on YouTube videos. The U.N. has given up trying to accurately update the death toll, which has soared beyond 100,000.
And in the midst of widespread butchery, Syria’s ancient Christian community is being devastated.
Just days ago, Investors Business Daily
reported, "the relentless carnage and horror that has engulfed Syria over
the past two and a half years has taken a particularly heavy toll on the
country’s Christian minority. An unknown number of civilians, including
religious figures, have been kidnapped or killed or remain missing, in a
conflagration that seems to have no end…."Friday, my friend Judy Feld Carr emailed me. “I cannot understand,” she wrote, “why there is not one word in the media about the destruction of the churches in Syria
.
Nobody even mentions it!”Judy Feld Carr knows more than her share about dangers emanating from Damascus, and about how an historic population’s way of life can be annihilated. Besides the torture, murder, or flight of thousands of 20th Century Syrian Jews, most of their synagogues, sacred books and millennia of their history are lost forever.
Carr also knows something about activism. Over the course of 30 years, she all but single-handedly smuggled, ransomed or otherwise snatched 3,228 Syrian Jews out of Hafez al-Assad’s iron fist.
Long before the Internet, she tracked down and telephoned courageous rabbis; hid coded messages in books, and identified urgently at-risk Jews. Gradually, Carr raised enough money to ransom them – usually one or two at a time.
Judy Feld Carr’s story is heroic
– she deserves far more accolades than she has received. And her concern for
Syria’s Christians is genuine. Like many other Jews, she asks why their plight
is met with near-complete silence and inaction by Western Christians. Mass graves have been found in Christian villages. Priests and clergy have been abducted, tortured and murdered. A dozen nuns from the battered Christian village of Ma’alula are still held captive, while their surviving co-believers remain hidden away from the fierce gaze of the “freedom fighters.”
Radical Islam’s hatred of Jews and Christians has long been inscribed in blood across the Muslim world. Today it continues to be writ large in Syria.
Chatter about peace continues, but nothing changes. Geneva II, scheduled for January 22, offers vague possibilities for a truce, but brutality continues to pound the Syrian people into submission or worse.
In October, Nina Shea quoted
Syriac Orthodox archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, "We have shouted to
the world but no one has listened to us. Where is the Christian conscience?
Where is human consciousness? Where are my brothers? I think of all those who
are suffering today in mourning and discomfort: We ask everyone to pray for
us."The archbishop’s cry stirs many of us, including Judy Carr. In an interview about the ongoing violence in Syria, she remarked, “Thank God, there are hardly any Jews left there [to kill or torment]. The Christians are next.”
As the saying goes, "First the Saturday People, then the Sunday people."
Of course nowadays, smuggling Christians out of Syria isn’t the answer – hundreds of thousands have already fled, some barely surviving in squalid refugee camps.
Still it bears repeating that not so long ago, one determined woman – a Canadian housewife, mother and music teacher – took action, engaged others, and turned a deadly tide. If Judy Feld Carr could rescue more than 3,000 endangered Jews, what about us?
There are millions of believing Christians in the world. Perhaps together we can awaken dozing Christian leadership. Pound on political doors. Publicly protest. Inform each other. Broadcast the story. Support responsible relief efforts. Watch and pray.
Suppose every Christian took action to help our brothers and sisters in Syria. What might happen?
Lela Gilbert is author of "Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner" and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of "Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians." She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website: www.lelagilbert.com.
Syrian Government
executes 11,000 prisoners
A report compiled by three international war crimes prosecutors claims that the Syrian government is behind the "systematic killing" of approximately 11,000 detainees between March 2011 and August 2013.
The Guardian
,
which obtained access to the report, says that the source of the report's
claims is a military police photographer who secretly worked with a Syrian
rebel group before defecting and fleeing the country. In the process, the
defector smuggled the images of "killed detainees" out of the country
on memory sticks. The defector, identified in the report as "Caesar," does not claim to have witnessed executions or torture himself. However, he describes the bodies of detainees, mostly young men, as being emaciated, blood-stained, and, in some cases, bearing signs of strangulation or electrocution.
The report claims that Caesar photographed as many as 50 bodies a day. The purpose of the photographs, according to the defector, was to allow a death certificate to be produced without allowing families of the deceased to see the body, as well as to confirm that orders to execute prisoners had been carried out. Families were usually told that their loved ones died from either a heart attack or "breathing problems."
The 31-page report was commissioned by a London-based law firm operating on behalf of the government of Qatar, which has financed and armed rebel groups in Syria and repeatedly called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stand trial for war crimes. Two of the report's authors, Sir Desmond de Silva and David Crane, argued war crimes cases related to the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone, while the third author, Sir Geoffrey Nice, led the prosecution of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague.
The publication of the report is believed to be timed to coincide with this week's peace conference in Geneva, which has been convened with the hope of creating a transitional government.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the report "further evidence of the systematic violence and brutality being visited upon the people of Syria by the Assad regime. We will continue to press for action on all human rights violations in Syria, and for accountability for those who perpetrate them."
A leading human rights group accused the U.S. and other world powers Tuesday of undermining efforts to bring Assad before the International Criminal Court.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the U.S. had focused too strongly on bringing the warring parties together for peace talks at the expense of putting "real pressure" on Assad's regime to end atrocities and hold those responsible to account.
The group also accused Russia and China of shielding their ally Syria from concrete action at the United Nations, such as arms embargoes.
"We cannot afford to wait for the distant prospect of a peace accord before the killing of 5,000 civilians a month comes to an end," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told reporters as he presented the group's annual report in Berlin. "The mass atrocities being committed in Syria should be a parallel focus of the peace process."
Human Rights Watch said the United States had "its own reasons" for opposing the referral of Syria to the Hague-based International Criminal Court, including concerns that this could have legal implications for U.S. ally Israel. But Washington has also been reluctant to lean on Russia for fear of jeopardizing diplomatic efforts to bring all parties together for a peace conference in Switzerland this week.
Roth said he hoped the report would push U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to call for an immediate end to atrocities in the same way that a chemical arms attack near Damascus last year resulted in swift international action.
"The pictures will make it that much harder to ignore the mass atrocities being committed by Assad," Roth told The Associated Press. "So far Kerry's only answer to the atrocities has been: `Oh we're trying to build peace; when we have peace the atrocities are going to stop.' But that's not an adequate answer when peace is going to be a long time coming and people are being killed every single day."
Four big things to know about Egypt in 2014
By Raymond Stock, Published January 24, 2014, FoxNews.com
Number Four: CHRISTIANS WILL STILL
SUFFER BUT MAYBE NOT AS MUCH. Egypt’s long-persecuted Christian minority, wrongly blamed and
physically targeted in a pogrom by the Islamists after Morsi’s fall, will find
neither the same level of active persecution, nor -- unfortunately -- much more
government protection than it did in the waning days of Mubarak, which were
also marred by frequent acts of mayhem against them.
Nor will they probably receive any help from the White House, which shamefully has been almost completely silent on the ever-more intense, large-scale violence against Christians throughout the Middle East and Muslim world in recent years.
Yet despite the divisions that still wrack the country, we ought to thank al-Sisi and the Egyptian people for ending the reign of the falsely “moderate,” militantly anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-female and anti-gay MB, that is allied with Al Qaeda and was using Egypt as a base to spread its influence and ideology.
For that service alone, Egypt today would be worth more than every penny it might yet see of the American taxpayers' money--even if we cannot buy a genuine democracy in a land that has never known one.
The
world's most ancient Christian communities are being destroyed — and no one
cares: Christians in the Middle East have been the victims of pogroms and
persecution. Where's the outrage in the West?
http://theweek.com/article/index/255403/the-worlds-most-ancient-christian-communities-are-being-destroyed-mdash-and-no-one-cares
Like many Coptic Christians in Egypt, Ayman
Nabil Labib had a tattoo of the cross on his wrist. And like 17-year-old men
everywhere, he could be assertive about his identity. But in 2011, after
Egypt's revolution, that kind of assertiveness could mean trouble.
Ayman's Arabic-language teacher told him to cover his
tattoo in class. Instead of complying, the young man defiantly pulled out the
cross that hung around his neck, making it visible. His teacher flew into a
rage and began choking him, goading the young man's Muslim classmates by
saying, "What are you going to do with him?"
Ayman's classmates then beat him to death. False
statements were given to police, and two boys were taken into custody only after Ayman's
terror-stricken family spoke out.
Ayman's suffering is not an isolated case in Egypt or the
region.
The Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein, were touted as the catalysts for a major historic shift in the
region. From Egypt to Syria to Iraq, the Middle East's dictatorships would be
succeeded by liberal, democratic regimes. Years later, however, there is very
little liberality or democracy to show. Indeed, what these upheavals have
bequeathed to history is a baleful, and barely noticed legacy: The
near-annihilation of the world's most ancient communities of Christians.
The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East,
as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject
of journalist Ed West's Kindle Single "The Silence of Our
Friends."
The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws,
mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic
and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West,
but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well.
Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same.
Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches
are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed
making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave.
In Egypt, a rumor that a Muslim girl
was dating a Christian boy led to the burning of multiple churches, and the
imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population. Illiterate children
were held in police
custody
for urinating in a trash heap, because an imam claimed that pages quoting the
Koran were in the pile and had been desecrated. Again, the persecution resulted
in Christian families leaving their homes behind.
In Syria, the situation is even worse. In June 2013, a
cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed. Friar Pierbattista
Pizzaballa reported that "of the
4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh... no more than 10 people
remain."
Two Syrian bishops have been kidnapped by rebel groups.
Militants expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. Patriarch
Gregorios III of Antioch says that out of a
population of 1.75 million, 450,000 Syrian Christians have simply fled their
homes in fear.
In Iraq, the story is the same but more dramatic.
According to West, between 2004 and 2011 the population of Chaldo-Assyrian
Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000. In 2006, Isoh Majeed,
who advocated the creation of a safe haven for Christians around Nineveh, was murdered in his home. The
number of churches in Iraq has declined to just 57, from 300 before the
invasion. The decline of Iraq's Christian population since the first Gulf War
is roughly 90 percent, with most of the drop occurring since the 2003 invasion.
The U.S. and the U.K. bear some responsibility in this
catastrophe, since they oversaw the creation of Iraq's postwar government and
did little to protect minority faiths.
West's book touches on the clueless and callous behavior
of Western governments in these episodes. U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq is
distributed according to Iraqi laws that discriminate against Christian Iraqis.
The U.S. pours billions of foreign aid into Egypt, and yet the Christians in
that country are not allowed to build churches (or even so much as repair
toilets in them) without explicit permission from the head of
state,
almost never granted. Last September, the U.S and Britain attempted to make
their support of Syrian rebel groups explicit and overt, but at the same time
some of these militias were executing a pogrom against Christians.
A Christian shopkeeper in Ma'loula summed it up in a quote to the BBC: "Tell the EU and
the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness,
and you sent us terrorists to kill us."
In an email to The
Week, Ed West says there are things America and its allies can and
should do to aid persecuted Christians:
Western
countries should make clear that our friendship, cooperation, aid, and help
depends on: 1) Religious freedom, which includes the right to change or leave
religions; 2) A secular law that treats all people the same. That was not the
case in Mubarak's Egypt, which the U.S. helped to prop up with $500 million a
year. That is not the case in Iraq, which under U.S. control instigated sharia
into its constitution. That shouldn't be acceptable. In 2022, Qatar will host
the World Cup, a country where death for apostasy is still on the statute
books. Why aren't we all boycotting it?
The last request does put the plight of Middle Eastern
Christians in global context. Western activists and media have focused
considerable outrage at Russia's laws against "homosexual propaganda"
in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It would only seem fitting
that Westerners would also protest (or at the very least notice) laws that punish
people with death for converting to Christianity.
And
yet the Western world is largely ignorant of or untroubled by programmatic
violence against Christians. Ed West, citing the French philosopher Regis
Debray, distils the problem thusly: "The victims are 'too Christian' to
excite the Left, and 'too foreign' to excite the Right."
Church
leaders outside the Middle East are afraid to speak out, partly because they
fear precipitating more violence. (Seven churches were fire-bombed in Iraq
after Pope Benedict XVI quoted an ancient criticism of Islam in an academic
speech in Germany.) Oddly, unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Russia, the
U.S. and the U.K. are the only powers acting in the Middle East that do not
take any special interest in the safety of those with whom they have a
historical religious affinity.
These
are the lands in which Jesus' apostles and their disciples made some of the
first Christian converts. In an interview, West pointed out that these
communities "were Christian when our ancestors were worshipping trees and
stones." Now they are in danger of imminent extinction.
In
2013, Raphael I Sako, the Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad, said the following at
his installation homily, "Still the shadow of fear, anxiety, and death is
hanging over our people." He warned: "If emigration continues, God forbid,
there will be no more Christians in the Middle East. It will be no more than a
distant memory." West's book is a sobering reminder that Western policy
has helped shape this grim fate for Middle Eastern Christians — and Western
silence allows it to continue.
The Silence of Our Friends (Kindle Single) [Kindle Edition]
Over the summer of 2013 Egypt witnessed its worst
anti-Christian violence in centuries, with dozens of churches burned down by
supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Syria Islamist gunmen occupy the
faith’s holiest site, while the Civil War has given Sunni extremists the chance
to empty Christian villages through ‘religious cleansing’. And ten years after
the fall of Saddam, Iraq’s pre-war Christian population has fallen from a
million to 200,000 and now barely clings on. Yet this greatest and most tragic
of historical events of the 21st century has been met with near apathy in the
West. In The Silence of Our Friends: The Extinction of Christianity in the
Middle East, Spectator blogger and Catholic Herald deputy editor Ed West looks
at the tragedy that has befallen Christian communities in the region where the
faith first took hold, and asks whether there is anything the west can do, or
if it will soon be the last Christmas in the land of St Paul.
Why "Vicar of Baghdad" is 21st Century hero
By Lela Gilbert
Published
February 06, 2014
FoxNews.com
News in the Middle East is rarely uplifting. On a daily basis, a roiling brew of fanaticism, insurgency and hatred boils over into country after country, yielding death and destruction.
In a region beset with such turmoil, it is highly unusual to come across someone who rises above the fray and – without a trace of cynicism – offers a message of hope. Thankfully, just such a voice was heard in Jerusalem this past weekend.
Reverend Canon Andrew White is an Anglican priest from Great Britain who is affectionately known as the “Vicar of Baghdad.” A large silver cross graces his chest; he walks with a cane and speaks with a faint impediment because of his personal battle with multiple sclerosis.
In 2003, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, White reopened St. George’s Church
in Baghdad. Today, he divides his time in several ways.He tends to the needs of the people in his war-torn parish, distributing food and medical care to both Christians and Muslims.
He travels across wide swaths of North America and Britain, seeking to raise awareness and funds.
He also tries to bring together Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in his never-ending quest to restrain religiously incited violence.
White’s indefatigable efforts entail his own medical issues, and they are acted out against an increasingly bloodstained backdrop.
Wednesday morning, Al-Arabiya’s headlines proclaimed that three separate bombs had ripped into the heart of Baghdad. Dozens were injured and more than 20 were killed.
Last month alone, 1,013 people in Iraq – 795 civilians, 122 soldiers and 96 policemen – died as a result of violence.
As Canon White spoke at Jerusalem’s Narkis Congregation
on Saturday morning, he lamented that 1,096 of his own parishioners have been
killed in the past five years.Yet despite these horrific statistics, St. George’s continues to provide food and clothing for the neighborhood, and it maintains a clinic offering medical and dental help. And the church’s numbers have not diminished. Even some 600 Muslim women worship there (White makes a point of saying that he does not seek to convert them). Somehow, the church is holding its own.
But the same cannot be said for Iraq’s greater Christian community. Christians are vanishing, going the way of the Jews before them.
There were once 135,000 Jews in Iraq; according to White, only six remain.
And Iraq’s Christians have fled by the hundreds of thousands in recent years. Out of 1.5 million in 2003, only around 200,000 remain. “There are more Iraqi Christians in Chicago than in Iraq,” White said. “Chicago, Detroit and Sweden. That’s where you’ll find Iraq’s Christians today.”
This is particularly tragic, because both the Jewish and Christian communities in Iraq are ancient and indigenous. They are neither post-colonial nor the result of Western missionary activity.
In fact, Iraq’s Christian community is one of the oldest in the world, dating to the first century. An early tradition says it was founded by St. Thomas – “Doubting Thomas,” one of Jesus’ 12 disciples – and others who shared his faith. Many churches still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
Nina Shea, director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom
in Washington, D.C., writes, “American leadership has responded to the plight
of Iraq’s Christians as if they are an inconvenient fact that gets in the way
of ‘real’ American interests. In fact, Iraq’s Christian presence is critically
important to its peace, democracy, and prosperity. The Christians are a segment
of that population that is politically moderate, educated, skilled and well
represented in the professions. Furthermore, without them, Iraq loses its
religious diversity and its experience of coexistence with the religious
‘other.' Drained of this segment of its population, Iraq’s ability to succeed
as a nation in any modern understanding of the term will be that much more
difficult.”The Christians who remain in Iraq today face constant danger; they risk being targeted for their faith or caught in others’ crossfire or suicide bombings. Many of them are penniless, and even if they could afford to flee, no safe haven awaits them; there is no Israel for Christians.
Feeding them, clothing them and treating their medical needs is the never-ending work of St. George’s Church.
Meanwhile, Canon White persists in alerting the West to Iraq’s diminishing Christian presence. In doing so, he embodies the remaining believers’ vulnerability and teaches us to weep with those who weep.
Such is the vocation of the indomitable Vicar of Baghdad.
Praying for him will strengthen his hands and honor his faithfulness.
And finding practical ways to inspire and encourage the remaining Christian believers in Iraq will let them know that they are surely not forgotten.
Lela Gilbert is author of "Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner" and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of "Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians." She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website: www.lelagilbert.com. Follow her on Twitter@lelagilbert.
Maranatha Baptist Church goes
against the Crusaders
A Christian college in Wisconsin is dropping its “Crusaders” nickname after nearly 50 years, claiming the moniker has become outdated in a “more global society,” university officials told FoxNews.com.
Maranatha Baptist University in Watertown and its Division III athletic teams have used the name since its founding in 1968. Matt Davis, the university’s executive vice president, said no complaints have been received by the school and stressed that it coincides with its name change from Maranatha Baptist College in December.
“But I also agree that times change and we understand that context changes,” Davis told FoxNews.com. “Our world has changed since 9/11 and we’ve become a more global society with the Internet. The heartbeat behind this was not political correctness, but expanded opportunities for our students.”
Selecting the university’s next mascot will be a collaborative effort, Davis said, and the new name will be revealed during the spring semester. Uniforms will reflect the change beginning in the fall. Hundreds of potential replacements have already been submitted by students, alumni and university stakeholders.
“We’re having a blast with the process,” said Davis, who declined to provide any early favorites. “It’s a fun process, but it’s also a serious process.”
The school’s online athletics publication, also known as The Maranatha Crusader, will be changed as well, Davis said.
While noting the contextual ties to a “Crusade” — defined by Merriam-Webster as “any of the military expeditions undertaken by Christian powers in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries to win the Holy Land from the Muslims” — Davis said the university’s education mission will not be altered. He does not expect the university’s decision to prompt other colleges to consider replacing the nickname elsewhere.
“Every school is different and every context is different, and I respect the leaders of those institutions,” Davis said. “We’re in no position to give input to or to instruct anyone else.”
The change had been under consideration for a “long time,” Davis said.
Meanwhile, an effort to move away from using “Crusaders” as a team name or as a mascot is not underway at several other colleges and universities contacted by FoxNews.com. At least eight other schools use the moniker, including the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts and Capital University in Ohio. In all, representatives from four colleges told FoxNews.com that the name is not an issue on their campuses.
“It’s important to understand how our alumni would feel about it,” Capital University spokeswoman Nichole Johnson said, adding that the Lutheran-affiliated school has used the name since 1963. “If it ever did become a divisive issue, or a dominant one on campus, we would be happy to have that conversation.”
In 1963, Johnson said the university’s council voted to change the school’s name to the Crusaders from the Fighting Lutherans, which was deemed inappropriate at the time. Other names considered at the time were the Saints and the Purple Knights, Johnson told FoxNews.com.
Elsewhere, at Clarke University in Iowa, president Joanne Burrows said the Crusaders nickname is on solid footing.
“I cannot comment on what is appropriate for Maranatha Baptist as they can and should do what they believe to be in the best interest of their institution,” Burrows wrote FoxNews.com in an e-mail.
A spokesman at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina told FoxNews.com the "Crusader" name is an 80-year tradition at the university, where it's a source of pride representing "heroism, chivalry and piety."
Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told FoxNews.com he welcomed the "Crusaders" change, but said he found team names or mascots that incorporate race or ethnicity more problematic, particularly those pertaining to Native Americans.
"I welcome the spirit behind the change," Hooper said. "It's obvious they thought about this. I applaud their effort."
Camel bones suggest
error in the Bible archeologists say Fox News, February 6, 2014
Archaeologists from Israel’s top university have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the arrival of domestic camels in the Middle East -- and they say the science directly contradicts the Bible’s version of events.
Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, Old Testament stories that historians peg to between 2000 and 1500 BC. But Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures say camels weren’t domesticated in Israel until centuries later, more like 900 BC.
“In
addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is direct
proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes,” reads a
press release announcing the research.
To find the first camel, Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef used radiocarbon dating to analyze the oldest known camel bones in the Arabian Peninsula, found at the remains of a copper smelting camp in the Aravah Valley, which runs along the border with Jordan from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea.
The bones were in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BC or later — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible, the researchers said. The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think lived there during the Neolithic period or even earlier.
Notably, all the sites active in the 9th century in the Arava Valley had camel bones, but none of the sites that were active earlier contained them.
"The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development," Ben-Yosef said. "By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries."
The arrival of domesticated camels promoted trade between Israel and exotic locations unreachable before, according to the researchers. Camels can travel over much longer distances than donkeys and mules, opening up trade routes like the Incense Road that stretched from Africa through Israel to India.
Sudanese Christians
hit with parachute bombs
The people of war-torn Sudan learned long ago to take cover when planes roared overhead, but the latest tactic being used on them -- parachute bombs -- is raining silent death down on innocent villagers, say alarmed activists.
The country’s extremist Islamic regime in Khartoum has stepped up the practice in the Nuba Mountains, dropping deadly bombs by parachute from high altitudes as president and accused international war criminal Omar al-Bashir seeks to rout rebel forces opposed to his brand of radical Islam.
In recent years, the Nuba Mountains, where Christians and Muslims live side by side, have become a battleground for the forces of al-Bashir's forces and the Sudanese People Liberation Army.
Caught in the crossfire are innocent civilians, especially children, who live in the mountainous region just north of the border of Sudan and South Sudan, the nation carved out of Sudan in 2011.
Children living in the Nuba Mountains grew up amid almost daily aerial bombardment,” Akshaya Kumar, a Sudan and South Sudan policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, told FoxNews.com. “They have learned how to quickly duck into makeshift bomb shelters when they hear a bomb dropping.
"Now, in a brutal shift in tactics, the Sudanese government has refined its assault," she continued. "With parachute bombs, the bombs drop silently and then only explode after a delay, when those sheltering emerge from safety."
On Monday, local aid workers told FoxNews.com two Sudanese Air Force jets dropped 13 parachute bombs on the villages of Tamadirgo and Dar, in the South Kordofan States of Sudan. The bombs killed at least three people, including a 13-year-old boy, sources said.
Al-Bashir, the 70-year-old dictator and former Army general, seized power in a 1989 military coup. As he moved the nation toward Islamic rule in the late 1990s and early part of this century, rebels fought back against the marginalization of Christians. Al-Bashir responded with a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the western region of Darfur, with an estimated 500,000 people killed and more than 2 million displaced. In 2008, al-Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Al-Bashir's embrace of parachute bombing is the latest demonstration of his willingness to kill his own people, according to aid workers. Footage provided to FoxNews.com of a Dec. 10 drop shows mountain villagers cowering as the parachutes flutter downward, then screaming in anguish as they tend to their dead.
“Some people ran away as soon as they saw the plane, while others stayed out of curiosity; they thought that they were parachuters landing,” Ahmed Khatir, who is from the region and works as a reporter for independent news service NubaReports.org
,
told FoxNews.com. “When the bomb got closer [to the ground], they realized it
was a bomb and it was too late for some people."Since April 2012, 1,371 bombs have been dropped on civilian targets in Nuba, according to NubaReports.org. But the parachute tactic only began in November, dropping bombs that weigh up to 820 pounds. With a delayed detonation and quiet drop, the parachute bombs have proven destructive and deadly.
The Sudan Consortium has recently reported that human rights monitors found that 22 civilians in South Kordofan were killed and 41 seriously injured in a four-week period in December and January. Monitors also documented 56 bombing attacks -- a number that tripled from the previous month. The recent numbers are the highest ever recorded by the consortium.
One apparent reason for the escalation of violence in the Nuba Mountains is new political developments in Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile going largely unnoticed as the international community has focused their attention on violence in the South Sudan.
"The difference in Sudan is the aerial terror sown by the Sudanese Air Forces," Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast told FoxNews.com
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