WASHINGTON — One-hundred percent of Christians in 21 countries around the world experience persecution for their faith in Christ as over 215 million Christians faced “high levels” of persecution in the last year, a leading human rights watchdog group reports. Continue reading “100% of Christians Face Persecution in These 21 Countries | re-blog CP World by Samuel Smith”
Tag: Saudi Arabia
Church in northern Arabia longs for ‘place to worship’
By Adelaide Mena
Washington D.C., May 30, 2013 / 04:05 am (CNA).-
As he oversees the missionary territory of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, apostolic vicar Camillo Ballin outlined Catholics’ need for religious toleration as well as a physical home for ministry.
A native of Italy, Bishop Ballin set out to study Arabic and Islam in order “to discover another world” after his ordination as a priest of the Comboni Missionaries.
In a May 29 interview with CNA, he noted that his travels have taken him to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, and eventually to his 2005 appointment as apostolic vicar of Kuwait. His vicariate – otherwise known as an ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the Church where a hierarchy is not yet fully organized – was expanded in 2011 to include the whole of the Northern Arabian Peninsula, which oversees Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The area has supported a Christian population since before the advent of Islam, a fact that many Christians in the area look to for inspiration, Bishop Ballin said. As an example, he pointed to church within the vicariate that is dedicated to St. Arethas and the 400 martyrs that were persecuted and killed over a century before Islam came to the area.
Today, ministry within the vicariate focuses upon the spiritual sustenance of 2.5 million Christians in the area, Bishop Ballin said.
Continue reading “Church in northern Arabia longs for ‘place to worship’”
The Silent Tragedy of Child Marriage – Re-Blog / Robert Spencer
The Silent Tragedy of Child Marriage
By Robert Spencer
May 20, 2013 – 8:00 am
“Since this is not negated later, we can take from this verse that it is permissible to have sexual intercourse with a prepubescent girl.” — IslamOnline.Com
Last Friday, an Afghan journalist named Mustafa Kazemi posted on Facebook a harrowing story about an eight-year-old girl in the Khashrood district of Nimruz province in Afghanistan, who was sold off into marriage to a mullah in his late 50s, and who bled to death on their wedding night.
It was one of many such tragedies in a land that little notes nor long remembers such deaths. An eight-year-old girl sold into marriage and dead after a brutal sexual assault that her body could not withstand is no more noteworthy than a pack animal that collapses under a too-heavy weight. It’s time and money wasted, that’s all. Forget about it. Get another one. Continue reading “The Silent Tragedy of Child Marriage – Re-Blog / Robert Spencer”
Saudi religious police arrest Ethiopian workers for practicing Christianity | Fox News Re-blog
Peanut gallery: The Saudis (World Watch List #2) are at it again… and Ethiopian Christians working in the country are their target… 53 arrested this month.
Nina Shea, the director of the Washington-based Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, told FoxNews.com that the arrests in Dammam are “part of Saudi Arabia’s policy to ban non-Muslim houses of worship and actually hunt down Christians in private homes.”
(Photo: Religious police during a training session in Riyadh September 1, 2007/Ali Jarekji)
What are the Saudis afraid of… if their brand of Islam is so superior to all other religious expression? Or, maybe it isn’t… and they know it wouldn’t survive without their state-sponsored religious Gestapo.
As for Christians living in the country, they won’t get a lot of help from their embassies. Their countries are much too beholden to Arab oil and money to care much about the persecution of their Christian nationals. Politicians’ rebukes are meaningless unless backed up with action. Don’t hold your breath on that happening.
The best we can do is pray for Christian expats living in the country… no small thing. And let the world know that the Saudis are doing to expat Christians in their country.
Please read the full Fox News article below –
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Saudi religious police arrest Ethiopian workers for practicing Christianity
By Benjamin Weinthal
Published February 21, 2013
| FoxNews.com – Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Saudi Arabia’s notorious religious police, known as the mutawa, swooped in on a private gathering of at least 53 Ethiopian Christians this month, shutting down their private prayer, and arresting the peaceful group of foreign workers for merely practicing their faith, FoxNews.com has learned.
The mixed group of men and women was seized in a private residence in the city of Dammam, the capital of the wealthy oil province in Eastern Arabia, and Saudi authorities charged three Christian leaders with seeking to convert Muslims to Christianity. The latest crackdown on Christianity in the ultra-fundamental Islamic country comes on the heels of a brutal 2011/2012 incarceration and torture of 36 Ethiopian Christians, and drew a sharp rebuke from a U.S. lawmaker. Continue reading “Saudi religious police arrest Ethiopian workers for practicing Christianity | Fox News Re-blog”
Muslim Persecution of Christians: December, 2012 – Re-Blog
Peanut Gallery: Raymond Ibrahim’s stated purpose in cataloging these monthly incidents of “Muslim persecution of Christians” is twofold:
1) To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.
2) To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Sharia.
Whether or not it is “systematic and interrelated,” you can decide for yourself. But it certainly is pervasive. And for the Christians on the receiving end, it can be terrifying… and sometimes horrific.
Prayer: As you read through the list, please pray for those people and places that God places on your heart.
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” – Ephesians 6.12 ESV
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Muslim Persecution of Christians: December, 2012
“Siad Deserved to Die Because He Was Not Committed to the Islamic Religion.”
by Raymond Ibrahim – February 6, 2013 at 4:00 am
Sweden: “Quite frankly we are at a loss why the Migration services [in Sweden] are so determined to deport [him]. People with weaker cases get permission to stay in Sweden, but not him.”
— Attorney for Reza Jabbari, a convert to Christianity seeking asylum in Sweden. If the Swedes return him to Iran, he is likely to face imprisonment or be sentenced to death for apostasy.
As usual, the month of Christmas saw an uptick in Christian persecution under Islam, in a variety of forms, from insults to murders. In Iran, Pastor Youssef Nadarkhani—after being imprisoned and tormented for years for converting to Christianity, then recently released thanks to international pressure—was rearrested again, on Christmas Day, to serve the remainder of his 45 days, which the court had earlier decreed could be served in the form of probation. In Syria, near Christmas, Islamic rebels beheaded Andrei Arbashe, a 38-year-old Christian man, and fed his body to dogs. In Nigeria, Christmas mass celebrations in several churches, were, once again, turned into scenes of carnage; and in Pakistan, Christians spent yet another “Dark Christmas.”
There were also the usual fatwas [Islamic legal decrees], forbidding Muslims to acknowledge Christmas: in “moderate” Indonesia, the nation’s top Muslim clerical body said that Muslims should not offer Christians greetings such as “Merry Christmas,” and that Muslims are forbidden from attending any Christmas celebrations. In Egypt, the Committee for Rights and Reform issued a similar fatwa, forbidding Muslims to congratulate Christians during Christmas. Even in the West, in Australia, the Lakemba Mosque issued a fatwa warning Muslims that it is a “sin” to wish people a Merry Christmas, because Christmas Day is among the “falsehoods that a Muslim should avoid … and therefore, a Muslim is neither allowed to celebrate the Christmas Day nor is he allowed to congratulate them [Christians].” Continue reading “Muslim Persecution of Christians: December, 2012 – Re-Blog”
The Peanut Gallery 