MidnightWatcher's Blogspot

‘This is the second in a series of posts about dwindling Christian communities in the Middle East’ by Global Post …

By Lauren E. Bohn, Global Post – “It’s been close to two years since Evon Loga Gabrieul’s 17-year-old son died, but she can’t step into his pristine gray-scale bedroom without breaking down.

‘They murdered him, and nothing’s changed. The country, my family…they both will never be the same,’ she weeps, peering at the charcoal log of grades the meticulous high-schooler used to chart his progress and a possible way out of his rundown, forgotten village in rural Egypt.

Ayman Labib, a Christian, was beaten to death by Muslim classmates in a murder case that punctuates the protracted sectarian tension between Christians and Muslims in southern Egypt, where a bulk of Egypt’s Christians live. Two boys have been convicted of his death and are now serving three-year prison sentences. But for a forgotten community in Egypt’s hinterlands, there’s a feeling that justice has not been served.

Since the uprising that ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, sporadic but intense sectarian demonstrations across Egypt reflect rising fears in Egypt’s Coptic community (which make up an estimated 5 to 10 percent of Egypt’s total population) that the uprising has empowered a predominantly Muslim Egyptian society that is at best indifferent to the Christian minority’s concerns.

With a president who staunchly hails from the Muslim Brotherhood and a new constitution that critics say offers religious minorities, especially Copts, little to no assurances, existential fear has pervaded villages like the Labib family’s.

Christians in Egypt, especially in the rural south, have long complained of systemic discrimination and violence. Among a laundry list of grievances, critics say Copts are woefully underrepresented in Egypt’s military, judiciary, diplomatic corps, academia and almost all electoral bodies. Christians face state-imposed restrictions on the right to build and maintain churches, regulations that Muslims don’t face when building mosques.

In some extreme publicized cases, Christians have claimed that fundamentalists have wrongly accused them of forced conversions and kidnappings of Muslim women. Some conflicts have violently escalated into rioting and church burnings, such as one a year and a half ago on a Christian center in Aswan. The incident triggered protests in Cairo outside the government’s television center known as Maspero, which the military brutally put down, leaving 27 dead. 26 of the victims were Christian.” Read more.

Flashback: Christian Persecution From ‘Arab Spring’ Insurgents In Syria Is Deliberate and Growing, ‘It Will Never Be the Same Anymore’ – “Nearly 100,000 Christians so far have fled from Homs and other cities being targeted by government forces, but it is no longer just to escape the crossfire. Now, more reports are revealing that a new wave of persecution is deliberate and growing… ‘It is over; we can’t get back what we lost,’ said one discouraged Christian refugee here in Jordan. ‘It will never be the same anymore for me or my family. We’ve lost hope.’ He said he had to flee with his family at night, because anti-Christian persecution in Syria is becoming a steadily growing reality.” Read more.

By BosNewsLife Africa Service – “Nigerian Christians appealed for prayers Tuesday, April 2, after Easter season violence in troubled central Nigeria left as many as 80 people dead and displaced some 4,500 others.

At least 19 people were killed since Easter Sunday when gunmen believed to be nomadic Muslim cattle herders attacked the mostly Christian Atakar group in Kaura district, a remote area of Kaduna state, officials said.

Witnesses said the attacks on three communities, including the Mafang and Zilang villages, killed many women and children. Kaduna police spokesman Aminu Lawan told reporters his forces were still investigating.

Ataka Christians live near Plateau state where authorities claimed fighting between cattle herders, who are mainly Fulani Muslims, and Christian villages killed nearly 60 people in recent days.

The area is on the uneasy dividing line between Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north and largely Christian south…

Christians said that following Sunday’s violence, thousands of villagers fled to the nearby hills.

Local government official Kumai Badu said in published remarks that some 4,500 people were displaced and two camps had been set up to house them.

Some who returned later to assess the extent of the damage were also murdered, according to rights group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW). Assailants also razed several homes, Christians said.

Many of those displaced by the destruction are reported to be staying in the local Amisi Primary School, as well as in nearby Fadan Attakar and Mifi villages.

‘We request prayers for, and extend our condolences to the families of all those who lost their lives during the tragic events of last week,’ said Reverend Yunusa Nmadu, the chief executive officer of CSW-Nigeria.

‘We also call on the relevant state governments to provide urgent assistance to the injured and displaced,’ Nmadu added.

The latest violence came after at least 36 people died and dozens of houses were burned in neighboring Plateau state when ethnic Fulani Muslims raided Christian villages in the week leading to Easter.” Read more.

By BosNewsLife Asia Service – “Muslims in Pakistan’s Punjab province have threatened to kill a young woman as well as her husband, child and in-laws because she abandoned Islam and converted to Christianity, BosNewsLife learned Monday, April 1.

Maria Manzoor, 26, and her 27-year-old husband Emmanuel Ghulam Masih said they are hiding with their ‘beautiful one-year-old daughter’ Yarusha Emmanuel after receiving death threats.

‘We have shifted from one place to another even in the last week,’ the couple explained in remarks obtained by BosNewsLife. ‘We have changed the location of residence, but now we are tired. We fear for our lives.’

Friends and pastors have been reluctant to provide them a shelter, amid security concerns.

Maria Manzoor said the threats come from her Muslim relatives and Islamist extremists. And, ‘I am told that my family is making threats to my husband’s father to bring me back and hand me over to my family’, she added…

The woman, who claims to have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior four years ago, said she is prepared to die for Him. ‘I have a strong faith in Jesus and have no fear of being killed for my faith. I would be proud to die for Him.’ However, ‘I am concerned about our little child,’ she added.

Additionally, Muslims have threatened to kill her husband and other relatives, confirmed their attorney Sardar Mushtaq Gill. ‘They have also threatened to kidnap her husband’s sisters and kill the couple and other relatives,’ added Gill, director of the Pakistan-based advocacy group Legal Evangelical Association Development (LEAD).

The ‘hate campaign’ emerged this year after Maria’s Muslim family found out about her Christian conversion and that she visits a local church while being pregnant of a second child, said her father-in-law, Ghulam Masih.” Read more.

• Flashback: Pakistan: Christian Man Murdered For Refusing To Convert To Islam
• Flashback: Pakistan: Christian Woman Brutally Tortured by Muslim Mob, Paraded Through Village Streets for ‘Anti-Islam Views’
• Flashback: Christians In Pakistan Told To Convert To Islam Or Leave, ‘Otherwise They Will Face Consequences’

Qur’an Sura 5:51, “O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.”

By Raymond Ibrahim, Frontpage Mag – “Dr. Abdullah Badr—an Egyptian Muslim scholar, Al Azhar graduate, and professor of Islamic exegesis, who spent ten years in prison under Mubarak, but, along with any number of Islamic terrorists and agitators, was released under Morsi—recently gave an excellent summation of the second half of the highly divisive Muslim doctrine of wala’ wa bara’ (or, ‘Love and Hate’)—namely, that the true Muslim should love and help fellow Muslims, while hating and being disgusted by non-Muslims.

During a conference last week (see video below, with English subtitles) he explained how he is so ‘disgusted’ by Christians, to the point that, if a Christian were to touch his cup, he would not drink from it:

[It’s] not a matter of piety, but disgust. I get grossed out.  Get that?  Disgust, I get grossed out man, I cannot stand their smell or … I don’t like them, it’s my choice.  And they gross me out; their smell, their look, everything.  I feel disgusted, disgusted.  I get disgusted not only by that, but by many things.

He kept stressing that, while Sharia law does not ban Muslims from eating food prepared by Christians, he personally is sickened by them.  Badr explained how he once entered a store in Egypt to buy food, but when he saw the crosses and Christian icons on the wall, and understood that the owner was Christian, he immediately gave the food away on the street.

Even so, the pious Badr went on to warn that any Muslim who goes out of his way to make a show of his disgust for Christians is a hypocrite.  His logic was perversely similar to Jesus’s teaching that those who show off their piety—Christ was talking about fasting, not hating—are hypocrites.

Instead, according to Badr, the disgust, and as he later explained in the video, the hate for Christians and other infidels, must Read more…