MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

Matthew 24:22, “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”

Colossians 3:12, “Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering …”

Acts 14:22b, “… we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.”

“During a visit to Pakistan, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches has urged for the protection of religious minorities and the need for the state to take necessary measures against religious intolerance.

‘The Pakistani government should not turn a blind eye to the culture of violence perpetrated through the use and abuse of the blasphemy law, which intensify communal hatred, intolerance and persecution that can hit anybody in the country, and particularly the religious minorities,’ said the Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, speaking at a press conference in Lahore, at the end of his three day visit.

Christians are among country’s religious minorities, alongside Hindus, Ahmadis, Parsees, Sikh and Baha’is, who are affected severely by the discriminatory laws – including the ambiguous blasphemy law 295 C, which has caused many lives, including of the minister for minorities Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, this year.

During his stay in Pakistan, Dr Tveit met with church and ecumenical leaders and representatives of civil society organisations.

The church leaders shared with him how religious minorities especially Christians, ‘live in an atmosphere of insecurity. The existences of Christians have never been threatened as it is today, and the situation has gone worse in the past years,’ the WCC chief was told.” Read more.

By LAWRENCE SOLOMON – “Egypt’s Arab Spring is leading to a mass exodus of its Coptic Christian community, with Canada a preferred destination – we’ve received about a sixth of the 100,000 who have fled Egypt in the past six months amid persecution by Islamic fundamentalists.

If history repeats itself, those numbers could become much larger – Egypt has 10 million to 18 million Copts and other Christians, the largest remaining Christian population in the Middle East by far. Should their persecution continue, the great majority could well flee in what would amount to one of history’s greatest forced emigrations.

Egypt’s Arab Spring is unfolding exactly as Copts feared. Hosni Mubarak, though seen as an unvarnished dictator in the West, was a protector to the Copts. He not only allowed them previously denied religious freedoms – everything from the right to repair their churches to live broadcasts of Easter services – but he also punished Islamists who persecuted them.

In the wave of unrest unleashed by the Arab Spring, that protection is now gone. Flagrant Copt-killing began with a church bombing during a New Year’s Eve mass that left more than 20 dead and dozens wounded, followed by another deadly attack during the Coptic Christmas on Jan. 7. But the exodus didn’t begin in earnest until March; that’s when a national referendum passed constitutional amendments that effectively stripped Christians of political rights while strengthening sharia laws involving amputations, stonings and crucifixions.

Since then, Islamists have been ratcheting up their incitement against Copts, calling them infidels and accusing them of being Western spies and traitors who are stockpiling arms in plots to secede from the country. This week, more than 20 Copts were killed in clashes with the army during a demonstration over an attack on a church.

As a result of their growing vulnerability, Christians are sorrowfully abandoning their homeland of almost 2,000 years. (Before the Arab invasion of the 7th century, Egypt was majority Christian.) ‘Copts are not emigrating abroad voluntarily, they are coerced into that by threats and intimidation,’ said Naguib Gabriel, director of the Cairo-based Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations.” Read more.

Egypt: Islamists Boast, ‘We Won’t Leave Any Christians in This Country’ – “A group of Muslims burnt down part of a church Friday – the Islamic Sabbath – in the village of Marinab, according to a report published in the daily Al Masry Al Youm. The village, situated close to the town of Edfu in the Aswan Governorate, is located some 800 kilometers south of Cairo. Security sources said Muslims rampaged through the village in what appeared to be a pogrom, clashing with the Christian residents and destroying their shops.” Read more.

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES – “The Obama administration has been obsessed with Muslim outreach and recently tried to mend fences with the Jewish community. Given the state of the world, however, the White House ought to be focused on helping the world’s oppressed Christians.

The United States has been wary to intervene in matters affecting Christians in the Middle East for fear of validating terrorist narratives that the West is engaged in a new crusade against Islam. The result of this passive policy has been to allow Islamic extremists increasingly to dominate the debate, often with tragic consequences.

On Sunday in Egypt, a clash between Coptic Christians and the military left at least 25 dead. Copts are the largest religious minority in Egypt, representing about 10 percent of the population. Attacks on the Copts have increased since former President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. That the military was involved in this incident was a signal that matters are taking a turn for the worse. The White House issued a lukewarm condemnation noting that President Obama is ‘deeply concerned about the violence in Egypt’ and that ‘as the Egyptian people shape their future, the United States continues to believe that the rights of minorities – including Copts – must be respected.’ In other words, the U.S. government will do nothing about the massacre of Christians.

Smaller Christian communities face even greater challenges. The world awaits definitive news about Iranian pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, who faced execution for apostasy after converting to Christianity from Islam. Sayed Mussa, an Afghan Red Cross worker who converted to Christianity, faced the death penalty. He was freed earlier this year after his case gained international attention but went immediately into hiding due to the public climate of hostility.

According to the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, the last Christian church in Afghanistan has been destroyed. The 500 to 8,000 Afghan Christians who wish to worship publicly can attend services at military bases, Provincial Reconstruction Team facilities and the Italian embassy, but there are obvious risks involved. State’s report says, ‘the U.S. government regularly discusses religious freedom with [Afghan] government officials as part of its overall policy to promote human rights.’ Considering all the aid America has given Afghanistan over the last decade, the State Department should do more than just talk.” Read more.

Obama meets Evangelical leaders, with ‘religious persecution’ as ‘top priority‘ – “Obama met with the Executive Committee of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 45,000 churches from 40 denominations across the United States, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. NAE leaders that attended the unprecedented meeting included Pastor Joel C. Hunter of Northland, A Church Distributed near Orlando, who was a member of the White House’s faith-based initiative advisory committee; Williams Roberts, national commander of The Salvation Army; and Leith Anderson, president of the NAE; among others. The meeting was the first time that Obama accepted NAE’s invitation to meet, Anderson told Religion News Service.” Read more.

‘Meeting’ with evangelical leaders about ‘religious persecution’ is one thing.  Doing something about it is another.  Given Obama’s track record, I doubt very much that anything will come from this, aside form a photo op …

By Joseph DeCaro – “JATINANGOR, INDONESIA (Worthy News)– Muslims of the Islamic Defender Front aided by local officials recently shut down a Protestant church in Jatinangor on rumors that the church was a haven for newly baptised Christians.

Rev. Bernard Maukar, head of the Christian community, was also accused of proselytising in a predominantly Muslim area.

The chief of the village where the church is located said he had the right to close it down because it was within his jurisdiction.

‘This area is under my authority,’ said Arief Saefolah. ‘Please, get out as soon as possible.’

Saefolah and other local officials seized all Christian property, including furniture, musical instruments, and vehicles.

A Christian woman lamented that the police didn’t lift a finger to stop the vandalism.

‘Police have no guts against this radical group,’ she said.” Source.

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.