MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

The Tribune – “One would think that Aasia Bibi, the young Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy in a Nankana Sahib village in late 2010, had suffered quite enough. For over a year, she has been kept in a ‘special’ cell at the Sheikhupura jail — separated from her husband and young children who remain in hiding. Her family has denied she committed any wrong, and alleges the charges against her stem from her using a cup to drink water also used by fellow Muslim labourer. Her husband lives in fear of death by extremists and there has been concern that Aasia herself will be murdered in prison — as others accused of blasphemy before her, have also met the same fate.

As if all this was not enough, we now hear Aasia has been subjected to ‘torture’ within jail, by a female warden who claims she found ‘illicit’ items in her cell. Few details are available on this matter, but it seems other staffers did little to stop the violation of jail rules that occurred. The abuse or manhandling of a detainee is, of course, prohibited. The guilty warden has since been suspended — but even this action seems to have come rather late in the day, and perhaps many people will support what the warden did (just like how many support what Mumtaz Qadri has done). Torture, of course, is endemic in our jails; no one should suffer it — but the string of miseries imposed on Aasia Bibi seem never to end. There is a possibility that she is being victimised for being a ‘blasphemy accused’ individual. This, too, has happened before.” Read more.

“Miss Anna (name withheld), is a 12-year-old Christian girl and the daughter of Arif Masih. Arif is employed as a street sweeper (scavenger) at WAPDA. He is a resident of quarter number 44, WAPDA colony, Shahdra, Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. Anna was kidnapped by two Muslim men on December 24, 2010, one day before Christmas. According to the report sent by the Pakistan Minority Movement, on that day in the morning her friend, Miss Nida, who lives in her neighbourhood, came to her house and asked Anna to go shopping. According to the plan of the perpetrators, her friend took her to a street where they waited in a car. Miss Nida introduced the perpetrator her as her uncle.

Anna was then taken a long distance and dropped at a house where she was raped. After two days some women, relatives of the rapists, namely Mumtaz Bibi.Farzana Bibi, Kiran Bibi along with her friend Nida came with some papers and told her to sign them otherwise she would not be released. Eventually she did sign with hesitation but was not released. The papers were about her marriage to one of the perpetrators, Muhammad Irfan. She was taken to several places and was forced to convert to Islam. When she refused she was manhandled and beaten.

After her abduction, her father filed an FIR against unknown people on 5/1/2011.F I R NO 18/11. Sr. No 2138 to the Factory area police station district Shaikhupura, Lahore. However, the police took no action for eight months.

In the first week of September 2011, more than eight months after her disappearance, Anna called her family from Tandianwalla, district Faisalabad, 190 kilometers from Lahore, and told them that she had been abducted but had escaped and was hiding at a bus stop. The parents went there and recovered her. She was brought back to her home and the parents produced her before the First Class Magistrate, factory area, Shadra, Miss Aasma Tehseen, who recorded her statement under section 164 of Cr Pc but did not order any action for her protection or a medical checkup.

The rapists then immediately contacted the police through their religious group and produced a marriage certificate showing that one of them, Muhammad Irfan, was married to her. When Anna’s parents went to the factory area police station to change the FIR to include the names of the rapists in the case the police flatly refuse to allow this and said she that as she had married and converted to Islam it would be better to hand over the girl to her legal husband. If they refused they were told that a criminal case would be filed against them.” Read more.

By Raymond Ibrahim – “An especially busy month in the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world, September also witnessed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton release the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. Ironically, aside from Iran and Sudan, none of the countries that habitually appear in this series were designated as ‘countries of particular concern,’ defined by the State Department as countries that are ‘engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.’

Egypt, for instance—which this year alone has seen nearly 80 Christians killed, their many churches burned or bombed, and their daughters kidnapped and forcibly converted—was not listed as a ‘country of particular concern,’ this despite the fact that the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan federal government commission, had recommended that the State Department designate it so.

Neither was Pakistan cited as a ‘country of particular concern.’ According to CNS news, ‘Clinton did not designate Pakistan even though the State Department’s own report stated that Pakistani law calls for the death penalty for people who commit ‘blasphemy’ against Islam or who convert from Islam to another religion—and even though the report listed multiple instances of the Pakistani government using the law to persecute Christians.’

In fact, September alone saw the following in Pakistan:

Blasphemy

• A Christian student was expelled from school because she misspelled an Urdu word that, instead of praising, insulted Muhammad, leading to accusations of ‘blasphemy,’ which carries the death penalty. After the teacher beat her, the principal was notified and Muslims staged demonstrations ‘demanding registration of a criminal case against the eighth-grader and her eviction from the area.’ As riots and violence were about to erupt, the military intervened: ‘They bundled the family in an ambulance and took them away…’
• ‘A Christian high school teacher has suffered false accusations of blasphemy by a student and some Muslim professors, because of dislike, revenge and hatred towards Christians. He was forced to leave his job and hide, he appealed to Court, but the laconic sentence of the judge of first instance invited him to ‘leave the country’…. Married and a father of three, he has been uprooted and is in hiding.’
• A 30-year-old Christian man accused of blasphemy and imprisoned, died in his cell from a treatable disease, ‘after officials denied him proper medical care.’ While in prison, he and others ‘accused of blasphemy, were kept in solitary confinement without access to a toilet, water or electricity.’

Abuse of Christian Women

• A Christian mother of five was raped by two Muslim men, who ‘tend to assume they will not be prosecuted if their victims are Christians’; she and her family are being threatened with violence unless they drop the charges.
• A Christian nurse was raped by a Muslim colleague who filmed the act in an attempt to blackmail her into renouncing Christianity and marrying him: ‘[he] raped me while his friend filmed the entire incident. They ruined my life completely.’
• Accordingly, a new report estimates that some 700 Christian girls annually are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and marry their Muslim abductors.

Categorized by theme, the rest of September’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is hardly limited to) the following accounts, listed according to theme and in alphabetical order by country, not necessarily severity.” Read more.  Attacks on Churches, Accusations of Apostasy, ‘Dhimmitude’ (Abuse, Debasement, and Suppression of Christians), Incitement against and Killings of Christians

By Raymond Ibrahim – “Sunday, the Egyptian military opened fire on thousands of Christians protesting in Maspero, Cairo. In the words of one Christian eyewitness, armored vehicles ‘came at great speed and drove into the crowds, going backwards and forwards, mowing people under their wheels. The most horrible scene was when one of the vehicles ran over a Copt’s [Christian’s] head, causing his brain to explode and blood was all over the place. We got a clear message today that we are no first class citizens.’

Various numbers of casualties have been given; AINA asserts that at least 35 Christians were massacred, many beyond recognition, and over 300 wounded; hundreds are still missing. Graphic pictures of some of the slain can be seen here.

Of course, you would not know any of this following the Western mainstream media (MSM). Conditioned to always appear ‘fair and balanced’—especially when the incidents being reported are neither—the MSM is giving the impression that the conflict consisted of equal violence and intolerance from both the military and ‘militant’ Christians—or, to use the MSM’s favorite, and increasingly meaningless, euphemism, ‘sectarian strife,’ conjuring up images of equally armed, equally militant factions fighting for supremacy.

Meanwhile, the MSM avoids the most obvious aspect of the conflict: religion, as Muslims—yet again—mow down infidel minorities for all to see.

While the military dictatorship cleanses Egypt of its Christian minority, the Egyptian media only depict images and ‘information’ that comport with that agenda—all, of course, while naïve, gullible, or lazy Western reporters lap it up. State news, for example, asserted that armed Christians were on the offensive, killing three soldiers, injuring twenty, and burning state property—wanton lies, according to many eyewitnesses—yet perfectly in line with the MSM’s obsession never to portray Muslims as aggressors.

Accordingly, these distortions were unhesitatingly regurgitated by the MSM. The BBC’s headline was ‘Egypt troops dead after Coptic church protest in Cairo’ [since changed]—as if that was the relevant news; the report’s opening sentence highlighted Christian protesters ‘clashing with security forces, with army vehicles burning outside the state television building,’ again, portraying the protesters as the aggressors.

Even Fox News had its readers sympathizing with Egypt’s military, even as the latter was busy massacring Christian citizens: the report told of an Egyptian soldier ‘collapsing in tears’ as Christians ‘attacked’ a fellow soldier. Of course, watching nearly 20 members of the police beating, dragging, and kicking a Christian for protesting the burning of his church—all while shouting slogans like ‘You infidel son of a bitch!’—might counterbalance Fox News’s weeping soldier.

A new CNN article titled ‘Egypt’s Tensions Explained’ does anything but that. After asking ‘Why have we seen an upsurge in sectarian violence this year?’ it states that ‘the reasons are not clear’—code for ‘the reasons are not politically correct’—and blames ‘those opposed to democratic changes’ and ‘efforts by extreme Islamist groups to resist attempts by the Copts to establish more churches’—again, careful to portray the Copts as somehow equally responsible as the Islamists who murder them.” Read more.

Iraqi Christian Ashur Yacob Issa Beheaded by Islamists

By CAROLINE B. GLICK – “On Sunday night, Egyptian Copts staged what was supposed to be a peaceful vigil at Egypt’s state television headquarters in Cairo. The 1,000 Christians represented the ancient Christian community of some 8 million whose presence in Egypt predates the establishment of Islam by several centuries. They gathered in Cairo to protest the recent burning of two churches by Islamic mobs and the rapid escalation of state-supported violent attacks on Christians by Muslim groups since the overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February.

According to Coptic sources, the protesters Sunday night were beset by Islamic attackers who were rapidly backed up by military forces. Between 19 and 40 Copts were killed by soldiers and Muslim attackers. They were run over by military vehicles, beaten, shot and dragged through the streets of Cairo.

State television Sunday night reported only that three soldiers had been killed. According to al-Ahram Online, the military attacked the studios of al-Hurra television on Sunday night to block its broadcast of information on the military assault on the Copts.

Apparently the attempt to control information about what happened worked. Monday’s news reports about the violence gave little indication of the identity of the dead or wounded. They certainly left untold the story of what actually happened in Cairo on Sunday night.

In a not unrelated event, Lebanon’s Maronite Catholic Patriarch Bechara Rai caused a storm two weeks ago. During an official visit to Paris, Rai warned French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria could be a disaster for Christians in Syria and throughout the region. Today the Western-backed Syrian opposition is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Rai cautioned that the overthrow of President Bashar Assad could lead to civil war and the establishment of an Islamic regime.

In Iraq, the Iranian and Syrian-sponsored insurgency that followed the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in 2003 fomented a bloody jihad against Iraq’s Christian population. This month marks the anniversary of last year’s massacre of 58 Christian worshippers in a Catholic church in Baghdad. A decade ago there were 800,000 Christians in Iraq. Today there are 150,000.

Under the Shah of Iran, Iran’s Christians were more or less free to practice their religion.

Today, they are subject to the whims of Islamic overlords who know no law other than Islamic supremacism.” Read more.

Not a Single Christian Church Left in Afghanistan – “There is not a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. State Department. This reflects the state of religious freedom in that country ten years after the United States first invaded it and overthrew its Islamist Taliban regime. In the intervening decade, U.S. taxpayers have spent $440 billion to support Afghanistan’s new government and more than 1,700 U.S. military personnel have died serving in that country. The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according to the State Department’s latest International Religious Freedom Report. The report, which was released last month and covers the period of July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010, also states that ‘there were no Christian schools in the country.’” Read more.

By MAGGIE MICHAEL – “CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s Coptic Christians have long felt like second-class citizens in their own country.

Now many fear that the power vacuum left after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak is giving Muslim extremists free rein to torch churches and attack Coptic homes in the worst violence against the community in decades.

An assault Sunday night on Christians protesting over a church attack set off riots that drew in Muslims, Christians and the police. Among the 26 people left killed in the melee, most were Copts. For Coptic scholar Wassem el-Sissi, it was evidence that the Christian community in Egypt is vulnerable as never before.

‘In the absence of law, you can understand how demolishing a church goes unpunished,’ he said. ‘I have not heard of anyone who got arrested or prosecuted.’

Once a majority in Egypt, Copts now make up about 10 percent of the country’s 85 million people. They are the largest Christian community in the Middle East. Their history dates back 19 centuries and the language used in their liturgy can be traced to the speech of Egypt’s pharaohs. Proud of their history and faith, many Copts are identifiable by tattoos of crosses or Jesus Christ on their right wrists, and Coptic women do not wear the veil as the vast majority of Muslim women in Egypt do.

Under Mubarak, the problems of Copts festered even if they faced less violence than they do now. Their demands for a law to regulate construction of churches went unanswered and attacks on churches went unpunished…

But shortly after Mubarak’s ouster, a series of assaults on Christians brought home a stark reality: The fading of authoritarian rule empowered Islamist fundamentalists, known here as Salafis, who have special resentment for Christians.” Read more.

By Edwin Mora – “(CNSNews.com) — There is not a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. State Department.

This reflects the state of religious freedom in that country ten years after the United States first invaded it and overthrew its Islamist Taliban regime.

In the intervening decade, U.S. taxpayers have spent $440 billion to support Afghanistan’s new government and more than 1,700 U.S. military personnel have died serving in that country.

The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according to the State Department’s latest International Religious Freedom Report. The report, which was released last month and covers the period of July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010, also states that ‘there were no Christian schools in the country.’

‘There is no longer a public Christian church; the courts have not upheld the church’s claim to its 99-year lease, and the landowner destroyed the building in March [2010],’ reads the State Department report on religious freedom. ‘[Private] chapels and churches for the international community of various faiths are located on several military bases, PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams], and at the Italian embassy. Some citizens who converted to Christianity as refugees have returned.’

In recent times, freedom of religion has declined in Afghanistan, according to the State Department.

‘The government’s level of respect for religious freedom in law and in practice declined during the reporting period, particularly for Christian groups and individuals,’ reads the State Department report.

‘Negative societal opinions and suspicion of Christian activities led to targeting of Christian groups and individuals, including Muslim converts to Christianity,’ said the report. ‘The lack of government responsiveness and protection for these groups and individuals contributed to the deterioration of religious freedom.’

Most Christians in the country refuse to ‘state their beliefs or gather openly to worship,’ said the State Department.” Read more.