MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE – “NAIROBI: Gunmen hurled a grenade at a Kenyan church in a town near the Somali border yesterday, killing one policeman and wounding another 14 people, the latest such strike in the volatile area since Nairobi sent troops into Somalia to fight Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents.

The attack occurred during morning prayers at the church in the northeastern town of Garissa, which is home to a large number of Somalis and where 18 people were killed in similar grenade blasts in July.

‘We have one fatality,’ said regional police chief Philip Tuimur after a policeman died of his wounds in the attack on the Utawala church at a police camp in Garissa, which lies about 140 kilometers (90 miles) from the Somali border. ‘We have mobilized our officers to track down the attackers,’ Tuimur added, without giving further details.

Kenya has been rocked by a wave of grenade attacks on cities including the capital Nairobi and the key port of Mombasa since the country sent troops into its troubled neighbor in October last year to fight the Al-Qaeda linked Shebab.

Fourteen people were also wounded in yesterday’s attack, which police said was carried out by two armed men. Most of the victims were policemen.

‘We are attending victims mostly suffering from shrapnel wounds and burns, and we are evacuating to Nairobi three of the victims due to the nature of their injuries,’ Dr. Mohamed Sheikh, medical director at the Garissa Hospital said.

The grenade ‘ripped through the roof during prayer session,’ said a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, while witnesses cited by police said the attackers also fired gunshots.” Read more.

Flashback: Kenya: Al-Shabaab Claims Responsibility For Church Attacks, Will Continue To Kill Those Who Do Not Worship Allah – “Somalia militia group Al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for Sunday’s twin attacks on two churches in Garissa County that left 17 people dead. The latest development came even as muslim leaders in Kenya agreed to form self-defence groups to protect churches following the deadly attacks. In a tweet on Wednesday morning, the insurgents said they carried out the attacks in retaliation for Kenya Defence Forces (KDF)’s incursion in Somalia. An Al-Shabaab loyalist Sheikh Hassan Takar said that the militia killed people who did not profess allegiance to Allah.” Read more.

ANSAmed – “The last Christian who was in the centre of Homs was killed, after the civilian population was evacuated due to widespread fighting.

According to the Vatican’s Fides news agency, 84-year-old Elias Mansour, a Greek-Orthodox Christian did not want to leave his home on Wadi Sayeh street – even though he knew his life was in danger – because he had to take care of his handicapped son, Adnane.

The Wadi Sayeh area, inhabited by both Christians and Sunni Muslims, is still at the centre of clashes between the army and rebel troops. The rebels have barricaded themselves in the areas of Khalidiyeh, Bab Houd, Bustan diwan, Hamidiyeh and the streets of Wadi Sayeh and Ouret al shayyah, surrounded by regular army forces. A Greek-Orthodox priest told Fides that Elias Mansour was killed yesterday. In the days preceding his murder, Mansour reportedly said that nothing would induce him to leave his home, adding that, if he met the rebels, ‘He would remind them about the Ten Commandments and the Holy Scriptures.’ The funeral will be celebrated today in an Orthodox church. Meanwhile, an Orthodox priest is trying to track down his disabled son, his fate remains unknown. According to Fides, the convent of the Jesuits in the Hamidiyeh area was also hit during ongoing fighting. The structure has undergone minor damage but no victims have been reported. The Jesuits and the displaced people who are sheltering within said that they have experienced moments of fear, but are unharmed.” Source – ANSAmed.

Flashback: ‘Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing’: Syrian Violence Drives 90% Of Christians From City Of Homs, Many Fear a ‘Second Iraq’ – ” Almost all Christians in the conflict-torn Syrian city of Homs have fled violence and persecution, amid reports that their homes have been attacked and seized by ‘fanatics’ with links to al-Qaida. With ninety percent of Christians having reportedly left their homes, the violence is driving fears that Syria could become a ‘second Iraq’ with church attacks, kidnappings and forced expulsions of believers.” Read more.

Flashback: ‘Deliberate and Growing’: Christian Persecution From ‘Arab Spring’ Insurgents in Syria Becoming a Steadily Growing Reality, ‘It Will Never Be the Same Anymore’ – “Refugees who have fled to Jordan from Syria are telling mission leaders supported by Christian Aid Mission about deliberate, new persecution from the ‘Arab Spring’ insurgents who are seeking to overthrow the brutal Assad regime in Damascus. 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 … It will never be the same anymore for me or my family.’” Read more.

Matthew 24:22,27, “And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened… For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

Colossians 3:4, “When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.”

By Rupert Shortt, The Telegraph – “Imagine the unspeakable fury that would erupt across the Islamic world if a Christian-led government in Khartoum had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Muslims over the past 30 years. Or if Christian gunmen were firebombing mosques in Iraq during Friday prayers. Or if Muslim girls in Indonesia had been abducted and beheaded on their way to school, because of their faith.

Such horrors are barely thinkable, of course. But they have all occurred in reverse, with Christians falling victim to Islamist aggression. Only two days ago, a suicide bomber crashed a jeep laden with explosives into a packed Catholic church in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 100. The tragedy bore the imprint of numerous similar attacks by Boko Haram (which roughly translates as ‘Western education is sinful’), an exceptionally bloodthirsty militant group.

Other notable trouble spots include Egypt, where 600,000 Copts – more than the entire population of Manchester – have emigrated since the 1980s in the face of harassment or outright oppression.

Why is such a huge scourge chronically under-reported in the West? One result of this oversight is that the often inflated sense of victimhood felt by many Muslims has festered unchallenged. Take the fallout of last month’s protests around the world against the American film about the Prophet Mohammed. While most of the debate centred on the rule of law and the limits of free speech, almost nothing was said about how much more routinely Islamists insult Christians, almost always getting away with their provocations scot-free.

Innocence of Muslims, the production that spurred all the outrage, has been rightly dismissed as contemptible trash. What, though, of a website such as ‘Guardians of the Faith’, run by Salafist extremists in Cairo? Among many posts, it has carried an article entitled ‘Why Muslims are superior to Copts’. ‘Being a Muslim girl whose role models are the wives of the Prophet, who were required to wear the hijab, is better than being a Christian girl, whose role models are whores,’ it declares. ‘Being a Muslim who fights to defend his honour and his faith is better than being a Christian who steals, rapes, and kills children.’ Hateful messages breed hateful acts. Is it any surprise that mobs have set fire to one church after another across Egypt in recent years?

The deeper truth masked by all the ranting – and, it should be added, by the blinkers of many Western secularists – is that Christians are targeted in greater numbers than any other faith group on earth. About 200 million church members (10 per cent of the global total) face discrimination or persecution: it just isn’t fashionable to say so. In 2010, I set out to write a chronicle of anti-Christian persecution on several continents. Published in my book, Christianophobia, the results of my research are even more disquieting than I expected.

Abu Hamza, the 7/7 ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan and other totemic figures were allowed to practise their religion openly in Britain, yet there is scarcely a single country from Morocco to Pakistan in which Christians are fully free to worship without restriction. Muslims who convert to Christianity or other faiths in most of these societies face harsh penalties. There is now a high risk that the Churches will all but vanish from their biblical heartlands in the Middle East.” Read more.

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Matthew 10:22, “And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”

By Raymond Ibrahim, Gatestone Institute – “The aftermath of collective punishment for Pakistan’s Christians—the inevitable byproduct of the notorious Rimsha Masih blasphemy case, concerning a possibly mentally challenged, 14-year-old Christian girl falsely accused of desecrating a Quran—was more dramatic than the blasphemy case itself. Indeed, knowing what was in store for them, some Christians even held a symbolic funeral procession, carrying a Christian leader in a coffin and digging a grave for the ‘deceased.’

Their apprehension proved too true—especially after another pretext for Muslims to riot emerged: the YouTube Muhammad video. After Friday prayers, Muslims attacked, killed, and robbed the Christians in their midst, who account for a miniscule 1.5% of Pakistan’s population. St. Paul’s Church in Mardan was attacked by hundreds of Muslims armed with clubs and sticks. After looting and desecrating the church, they set it on fire (see picture here). Next, Muslims raided a nearby church-run school; they looted and torched it, as well, and burned down a library containing more than 3,000 Christian books. Although the library also contained thousands of books on Islam—making the Muslim mobs’ actions blasphemous under Pakistan’s law—’the attack continued for more than three hours, with minimal efforts by the authorities to stop it.’

Separately, gunmen on motorbikes dressed in green (Islam’s color) opened fire on the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Cathedral in Hyderabad , where they murdered at least 28 people. Their immediate target appears to have been a nun, Mother Christina. Days later, unknown men reportedly threatened workers at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Hyderabad. ‘We will teach a lesson to the Christians,’ they said, and destroyed the hospital’s windows and doors. Naeem Samuel, the bishop of Trinity Evangelical Church was assaulted, severely beaten, and injured as he exited his church.

Meanwhile, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, far from condemning such outrages, validated them by falsely accusing the Muhammad movie for all the violence—even as they exposed their double standards by refusing to denounce paintings offensive to Christians, such as ‘Piss Christ.’ The New York Times also exposed its bias by defending the anti-Christian ‘Piss Christ’ as ‘art,’ while condemning the anti-Muslim Muhammad movie as hate-speech.

Categorized by theme, the rest of September’s stories of Christian persecution around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and in country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.

Church Attacks

Bahrain: Long considered the most tolerant nation in the Arabian Peninsula, with a 30% non-Muslim population of foreign workers, Bahrain is the latest Muslim nation to exhibit intolerance toward churches: Sunni clerics strongly opposed the planned construction of a Catholic church, ‘in a rare open challenge of the country’s Sunni king. More than 70 clerics signed a petition last week saying it was forbidden to build churches in the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam.’ One prominent cleric, Sheik Adel Hassan al-Hamad, proclaimed that ‘anyone who believes that a church is a true place of worship is someone who has broken in their faith in God.’

Egypt: Kasr El-Dobara, the largest evangelical church in the Middle East, located in Egypt, was besieged by ‘unknown people’ hurling ‘stones and gas bombs.’ The first gas bomb thrown at the church was described as an ‘error’ by police, but it was soon followed by Read more…

Armenia Now – “The St. Gevorg church in Aleppo’s Armenian-populated district of Nor Kyugh was set ablaze on Monday, reported Tert.am, quoting a representative of the local Armenian prelacy.

Speaking to the online paper, the spokesman, Zhirayr Reisian, confirmed that the church had become a target of rebels and that it had almost been reduced to ashes.

Reisian also said that the Mesrobian Armenian school adjacent to the church has been seriously damaged, too.

Earlier on Monday a blast near an Armenian district of Syrian capital Damascus reportedly killed 10 people and wounded around 50. Armenians were feared to be among both dead and wounded.

Later Reisian told state-run agency Armenpress that a group of 10 Christians, including seven Armenians, was kidnapped near Aleppo.

About four dozen Syrian Armenians have reportedly been killed since the start of the conflict in Syria in March 2011. Hundreds of an estimated 80,000 Syrian Armenian, mostly concentrated in Aleppo, have taken refuge in Armenia since fighting between government and opposition forces reached the city last July.” Source – Armenia Now.

Flashback: Syria: Christians Falling Into Severe Financial Hardship, Could Now Face Bloodbath From Islamist ‘Free Syrian Army’ – “The streets are most dangerous that is, unless it’s a Friday, when a few Syrian Christians dare to step outside of their homes amidst the persecution of Syria’s Christians by the Islamic rebels of the ‘Free Syrian Army. The Christians in Syria … could be facing a bloodbath. The signs are there right now, and only Russian and Chinese resistance to ‘the West’ is keeping the Syrian church from complete extermination. In many Syrian towns, lawlessness has become the norm. When government forces aren’t present, Muslims have been known to rob churches and kidnap, rape, or even kill Christian women.” Read more.

Morning Star News – “Amid threats of further losses, classes resumed this month at a Khartoum Bible school and church compound that Muslim extremists set ablaze in April, an area Christian source said.

Students and administrators at Gerif West Bible School in Sudan have yet to fully recover their losses from the April 21 attack, but the source said classes resumed on Oct. 15 even as area Muslims vie to take school land and anti-Christian messages emanate from a nearby mosque loudspeaker on most Fridays.

Muslim leaders have been asserting through the mosque loudspeaker that Christian institutions should not be permitted in Sudan, as the country should be a ‘purely Islamic state’ since the secession of South Sudan on July 9, 2011, he said.

‘We are expecting the level of persecution to rise in Sudan in the coming days,’ a pastor who works at the Bible school told Morning Star News by phone, adding that hostilities against churches and Christians were intensifying.

Islamist assailants shouting threats against Christians and ‘Allahu Akbar [Allah is greater]’ on April 21 broke down the Christian compound wall with a bulldozer and set fire to the school and a Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church (SPEC) building. Also damaged were a clinic, a home for the elderly and living quarters.

The hard-line Muslim sheikh who led the attack, Muhammad Abdelkrim, on Sept. 21 urged Muslims to tolerate no Christian presence and to have no dealings with them because they were ‘infidels,’ the source said.

‘We will never forgive Christians’ for not being Muslims, the imam declared during a mosque service on Sept. 21 through amplified loudspeakers, besides asserting that Christian institutions have no place in Sudan.

The attack ruined four halls used by three churches and burned the belongings of students at a dormitory. School library books, including 50 cartons of Bibles, were also destroyed. The assailants destroyed school furniture and broke into a safe and stole college funds.

Police stood by watching the destruction, according to a statement from SPEC.” Read more.

Flashback: Sudan: Bible College Bombed by Islamic Government While Students Studied in Class – “At least eight bombs were dropped in the area of Heiban Bible College Wednesday during the school’s first day of classes, according to a statement by Samaritan’s Purse, Franklin Graham’s Christian humanitarian group, which supports the school… ‘We have been working for years in Sudan,’ Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham said on Wednesday. ‘Today our Bible school in Heiban in the Nuba Mountains was bombed by the Sudanese Air Force. No one was killed or hurt, but buildings were destroyed. Please pray for the safety of believers, and that God would intervene.’” Read more.

Flashback: Sudan: Christianity No Longer an Accepted Religion, Muslims Attack Christians Trying to Rebuild Church – “Emboldened by government calls for a Sudan based on Islamic law since the secession of South Sudan, Muslims long opposed to a church near Khartoum have attacked Christians trying to finish constructing their building, sources said. The Sudanese Church of Christ (SCOC) congregation in Omdurman West, across the Nile River from Khartoum, has continued to meet for Sunday worship in a building without a roof in spite of opposition from area Muslims and local authorities, the sources told Compass. Claiming that Christianity was no longer an accepted religion in the country, Muslims in the Hay al Sawra, Block 29 area of Omdurman West on Aug. 5 attacked SCOC members who were constructing the church building, the sources said.” Read more.