MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Maria Gomes – “Dhaka (AsiaNews) – ‘I believe in Christ. I welcomed him’ for ‘he is my saviour,’ said Vincent (not his real name for security reasons), a former Bangladeshi imam who is now Catholic and for this reason has endured persecution for a long time in his native community.

His journey towards conversion began abroad, far from Bangladesh. It led him first to baptism in the Presbyterian Church. After that, he fell in love with a Catholic woman, married her and then converted to her faith. Once they were back in Bangladesh, Vincent and his wife were welcomed by threats and violence. Members of his community beat him almost to death.

Islam in the state religion in Bangladesh but the constitution does not recognise Sharia and guarantees freedom of worship. This makes it one of the most open Muslim states, where conversions can occur in an atmosphere of general tolerance.

However, Islam’s social and cultural ascendancy is such that in many communities all sorts of pressure is put on people. In some cases, notaries refuse to sign papers testifying to conversions. In other cases, like that of the former imam, people resort to physical and psychological violence.

After almost two months in hospital, Vincent is back home. But the same Muslims who followed him and held him in high esteem when he was their imam now cannot accept his new ‘status’.

Beating is also not enough. Other forms of violence can be used. Both husband and wife have been ostracised, forced to move from home to home. Vincent eventually lost his job and now has to do odd jobs to survive.

Today he is a troubled man. Yet, his community’s banishment has not pushed him away from Jesus. He continues to attend Mass now more than ever, and repeat, ‘I believe in Christ. In him, I was reborn. He is my Saviour.'” Source – AsiaNews.it.

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, The Associated Press – “Bamako, Mali • Mali’s crisis deepened Wednesday, as officials in the fabled northern city of Timbuktu confirmed that the Islamic rebel faction that seized control of the town over the weekend has announced it will impose sharia law.

Rebels in the country’s distant north have taken advantage of the power vacuum created last month when renegade soldiers in the capital of Bamako overthrew the nation’s democratically elected leader. In the chaos that followed the March 21 coup, they advanced on strategic towns in the north, including the ancient city of Timbuktu, located over 620 miles from the capital.

The ethnic Tuareg rebels included a secular faction fighting for independence, and an Islamic wing, Ansar Dine, whose reclusive leader called a meeting of all the imams in the city on Tuesday to make his announcement.

‘He had the meeting to make his message to the people known, that sharia law is now going to be applied,’ said the Mayor of Timbuktu Ousmane Halle, who was reached by telephone. ‘When there is a strongman in front of you, you listen to him. You can’t react,’ he said, when asked what the reaction was of the imams of a historic town known for its religious pluralism and its moderate interpretation of Islam.

‘Things are going to heat up here. Our women are not going to wear the veil just like that,’ said the mayor.

Kader Kalil, the director of a communal radio station who was asked to cover the meeting and who later interviewed the Ansar Dine leader Iyad Ag Ghali, confirmed that sharia had been imposed.

He said in addition to the wearing of the veil, thieves will be punished by having their hands cut off and adulterers will be stoned to death.

In a show of force, the Islamic rebels on Wednesday drove through the town in a tank-like armored-personnel carrier, their ominous black flag flapping in the wind above the cannon.

More than 90 percent of the city’s roughly 300 Christians have fled since the city fell to the rebels on Sunday, said Baptist Pastor Nock Ag Info Yattara, who is now in Bamako. He said not one of the 205 people in his congregation, which has worshipped in Timbuktu since the 1950s, has stayed behind. ‘We cannot live like that,’ he said.” Read more.

By Katherine Weber, Christian Post Reporter – “An Egyptian court has sentenced this week a 17-year-old Coptic student to three years in jail for posting drawings of the prophet Muhammad on his Facebook profile in Dec. 2011. The court ruled that the images were offensive to Islam and mocked the prophet.

‘Assiut child’s court ordered the jailing of Gamal Abdou Massoud … for three years after he insulted Islam and published and distributed pictures that insulted Islam and its Prophet,’ a statement issued by the court read, as reported by Reuters.

The images appeared on Massoud’s Facebook page in December of last year, and caused riots and attacks on Coptic Christians in his hometown of Assuit, in southern Egypt.

Villagers attacked Massoud’s home as well as the homes of other Christians, and security and military forces were reportedly dispersed across Massoud’s hometown to prevent further vandalism, firing tear gas at the Muslim protesters.

Several Christian homes were burned during the attacks, and several Christians were injured.

Massoud was also accused of distributing the images to some of his school friends. The teen argued that he did not upload the offensive drawings onto his Facebook account, but rather they were posted without his knowledge.” Read more.

“Washington, D.C. (April 3, 2012) – On March 31, suspected Islamists threw a grenade and killed two Christians and wounded more than 30 in the Kenyan city, Mtwapa. The Christians were holding an outdoor worship service at the time of the attack. A simultaneous bomb attack was also carried out on a bar in the nearby city of Mombasa.

‘Three people who were sitting in a parked car near the site of the event threw a grenade and drove away. Then I heard a blast and saw some women down, crying for help. A lady died on the spot. About 15 people were seriously wounded. Two days after the blast, a young boy died from the injuries,’ said Rev. Simon Kirariuki Kimami, a pastor with the Kenyan Assembly of God, in a statement to ICC.

More than 150 Christians were attending the outdoor service. Muslims were also holding a meeting 900 feet from the scene of the attack. The Islamic preachers were vilifying Christianity in their sermon which could be heard from the location where the Christians were holding their conference.

Kenyan officials blame members of the radical Islamic group, Al-Shabaab, for the bomb attacks. Al-Shabaab has been carrying out attacks in Kenya after the government sent its troops to fight the Islamic group in Somalia.

‘My message to Christians around the world is to be steadfast in serving and honoring the Lord Jesus Christ, even in the face of persecution and sometimes violent attacks. [I urge Christians] not to retaliate. [Rather] they should show love even when they are attacked,’ said Patrick Muchiri in an interview with ICC. Muchiri is a pastor with the Mombasa Pentecostal Church.” Read more.

“Morocco (MNN) ― Two years ago, many foreign Christians were expelled from Morocco. It changed the face of the Moroccan church. The Christians, for example, now meet in smaller groups than they were used to. Twenty members are a big church nowadays.

2010 was a difficult year for the church in Morocco. ‘After the foreigners were expelled, almost half of the churches stopped; it was really a big crackdown’ says an Open Doors worker responsible for North Africa. A year later, things turned normal again for the estimated 3,000 Christians, but the tendency is to split up the groups of believers into smaller groups.

The current year is seen as a crucial year for the church. There are some signs that things might become more difficult. In the beginning of March, three brothers were arrested at a coffee shop. ‘It was clear that they were arrested because of their Christian activity. The police asked questions about this and tried to find Christian literature or material.’ According to the Open Doors spokesman, they also tried to find the pastor of the three men. He was warned, however, and went to a safe place. The three men were released a day after their arrest because of lack of proof.

“For the Christians in Morocco, these arrests are a sign. The country is now governed by a government with clear influence of Islamists. Christians believe that the arrests are the start of a new trend,” says the Open Doors worker.” Read more.

By Jibran Khan – “Islamabad (AsiaNews) – Islamic fanaticism is casting a dark shadow over Easter celebrations this year in Pakistan. The country’s Christian community has already received threats and warnings against celebrating the occasion. Now sources in Sarghoda District in Punjab tell AsiaNews that someone tore down Easter signs and decorations at the Eidgah Christian colony. The unknown attackers also threw black paint on the community’s sacred images and made threats against those present, warning them not to continue in their preparations.

When residents turned to the local police to file a report, no one at the station would do it. Instead, they told the complainants to leave.

With courage and determination, some of the faithful put back the signs and images. However, once again, in the evening of Palm Sunday, fanatics came back for another raid. This time, they threw away the images and threatened punitive reprisals against the Christian colony.

Yasir Masih, a local resident, spoke to AsiaNews about the situation. ‘For years, colony residents have come together to prepare Holy Week,’ he said. Equally, ‘for years, we have been threatened. Even though we reported it to the authorities, they didn’t take it seriously. This year, they [the fanatics] have come to our streets and threatened us. We are not safe, and we are scared.'” Read more.

By Benjamin Weinthal – “Berlin — A group of European Catholic Bishops breathed fresh air into countering the Saudi Grand Mufti’s call to ‘destroy all the churches‘ in the Gulf region. Last week, German and Austrian Roman Catholic bishops blasted Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh for his Islamic religious order – fatwa — as an expression of grave-human rights violations for Christian foreign workers in the region and for the sake of freedom of religion.

According to the Reuters report penned by Tom Heneghan, the wire service’s religion editor , Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops Conference, said the mufti ‘shows no respect for the religious freedom and free co-existence of religions’, especially all the foreign laborers who made its economy work. Archbishop Zollitsch continued ‘It would be a slap in the face to these people if the few churches available to them were to be taken away.’

Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and expert on Christians in the Middle East, told me that the fatwa will have consequences for Christians in the region, and the West should respond with a counter ‘anti-genocide campaign’ based on the U.N.’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified on January 12, 1951.

Sadly, there is no shortage of persecution of Christians in majority-Muslim countries. Iran’s refusal to release the brave Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who faces the death penalty for his embrace of Christianity, is a telling example of the horrific anti-Christian environment in the Islamic Republic.

The persecution of Christians, as the European Bishops noted, is a violation of human rights. A search on the websites of Human Rights Watch in New York on Wednesday showed no condemnations of the grand mufti’s statements.” Read more.

“JUBA, South Sudan, March 30 (CDN) — After Khartoum denied that it had bombed civilians earlier this month, Sudanese aerial strikes last week were aimed at church buildings and schools in Kauda, South Kordofan state, a humanitarian aid worker said.

Antonov airplanes dropped bombs on Thursday and Friday (March 22 and 23), destroying some houses and cattle near the church buildings and schools but causing no casualties, he said.

Humanitarian agencies consider the Islamic government’s targeting of civilians in the Nuba Mountains, which has a large Christian population, an ‘ethnic cleansing’ against non-Arab peoples in the multi-ethnic state, with the added incentive of ridding the area of Christians, he said.

Churches in the Nuba Mountains are holding worship services very early in the morning and late in the evening in order to avoid aerial bombardments that target their churches, he said. Most of the bombings take place during daytime, when visibility is better for pilots of the Russian-made Antonov planes.

Khartoum is actively recruiting more security personnel and sending them to South Kordofan to help kill or arrest Nuba civilians, including Christians, sources said. Islamic government officials consider the various Nuba ethnicities as enemies or ‘infidels’ in their campaign to clear the region of non-Arab races and Christianity.” Read more.

Flashback: Sudan: Over 500,000 Christians Have Less Than a Month to Leave North Sudan, Aid Agencies Fear Humanitarian Catastrophe – “Sudanese Christians who have barely a month to leave the north or risk being treated as foreigners are starting to move, but Christian leaders are concerned that the 8 April deadline set by Islamic-majority Sudan is unrealistic. ‘We are very concerned. Moving is not easy … people have children in school. They have homes … It is almost impossible,’ Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Adwok, the Khartoum archdiocese auxiliary told ENInews in a telephone interview on 7 March. Sudan in February announced the deadline for the former citizens it had stripped of nationality after South Sudan’s January 2011 vote to secede. The ultimatum will affect an estimated 500,000-700,000 people, who are mainly Christians of southern origin that still live in the north…” Read more.

“LAHORE (Pakistan) – It was barely 4am when 19-year-old Rinkal Kumari disappeared from her home in a small village in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province. When her parents awoke they found only her slippers and a scarf outside the door.

A few hours later her father got a call telling him his daughter, a Hindu, had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim boy.

Only days later, Ms Seema Bibi, a Christian woman in the province of Punjab, was kidnapped along with her four children after her husband couldn’t repay a loan to a large landlord. Within hours, her husband was told his wife had converted to Islam and wouldn’t be coming home. Ms Seema Bibi escaped, fled the village and has gone underground with her husband and children.

Hindu and Christian representatives say forced conversions to Islam have become the latest weapon of Islamic extremists in what they call a growing campaign against Pakistan’s religious minorities, on top of assassinations and mob intimidation of houses of worship. The groups are increasingly wondering if they still have a place in Pakistan.

‘It is a conspiracy that Hindus and Christians and other minorities should leave Pakistan,’ says Mr Amar Lal, the lawyer representing Ms Kumari in the Supreme Court. ‘As a minority, we feel more and more insecure. It is getting worse day by day.’…

‘Christian and Hindu girls are targeted more and more,’ says Father Emmanuel Yousaf, who heads the National Commission for Justice and Peace, an organization born out of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference.” Read more.

Flashback: Pakistan: Study: 74% of women from minority communities suffer sexual harassment – “Around 74 percent of Pakistani women from minority communities — Christians and Hindus — were sexually harassed, while 43 percent faced religious discrimination at workplaces in 2010 and 2011, a study said. Around 27 percent of minority women faced discrimination in admission to educational institutions and were forced to take Islamic studies for absence of any alternative subject, said National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) executive director Peter Jacob.”Read more.

Damascus, Syria, Mar 27, 2012 / 04:04 am (CNA) – “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.

The exodus of 50,000 or more Christians has taken place largely in the past six weeks. It is part of al-Qaida-linked militant Islamic groups’ ‘ongoing ethnic cleansing’ of Christians, according to Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need.

Homs has been home to one of Syria’s largest Christian populations and Church sources say that the faithful have borne the brunt of the violence. They have escaped to villages, many of which are in mountains 30 miles outside the city.

Islamists have allegedly gone from house to house in the Homs neighborhoods of Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan and have forced Christians to leave without giving them a chance to take their belongings.

The crisis in Homs has increased fears that Islamists are gaining influence in the region in the power vacuum left by the overthrow of other Arab governments in the ‘Arab Spring.’

The comparisons with Iraq are also ominous.” Read more.

Yes, you’ve read that right.  The country that has become “a useful model for new Arab regimes” has now been confirmed as one of the worst religious freedom offenders in the world. Alongside Egypt who now vows to one day kill all Jews, this is a nation that the Obama Administration is now actively arming, a nation that now makes verbal attacks against Israel “a central feature” of its political discourse. Welcome to the “new” face of “moderate Islam” …

By Stoyan Zaimov – “Turkey, considered a key U.S. ally in the war on terror, has been placed on a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) list of worst religious offenders, alongside countries such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea – once known as the ‘axis of evil,’ a phrase coined by former U.S. President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

In the last few years, Turkey was present on USCIRF’s watch-list of countries that might be committing religious suppression, but its latest report, released in March and covering the period between April 1, 2011 and Feb. 29, 2012, has placed the Eastern European nation on its list of ‘countries of particular concern’ category for its ‘systematic and egregious limitations’ of religious freedoms.

This now puts Turkey in the same category as the ‘axis of evil’ governments, along with Tajikistan, Myanmar, Egypt, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

The main reason for Turkey’s placement on the list has been cited as the country’s treatment of its Christian minority, which is constantly targeted and discriminated against. Christians are a distinct minority in Turkey – the CIA World Factbook reveals that Muslims make up 99.8 percent of the near-80 million population, while Christians and Jews account for only 0.2 percent.” Read more.

Flashback: Turkey: Muslims Subjecting More Christians to Discrimination and Attacks, Followers of Christ Vilified in Media, Textbooks – “Despite some promising developments, Christians in Turkey continue to suffer attacks from private citizens, discrimination by lower-level government officials and vilification in both school textbooks and news media, according to a study by a Protestant group. In its annual ‘Report on Human Rights Violations,’ released in January, the country’s Association of Protestant Churches notes mixed indicators of improvement but states that there is a ‘root of intolerance’ in Turkish society toward adherents of non-Islamic faiths.” Read more.

Flashback: Turkey: From Churches to Mosques, See What Happens When a Secular State is Taken Over by Islamists – “A story in today’s International Herald Tribune (read here on the New York Times website) provides an interesting insight into exactly what happens when a secular state is taken over by Islamists. The piece concerned the Hagia Sophia of Iznik, an ancient church that brought 40,000 tourists to the town south of Istanbul much to the delight of the locals. Iznik was once known as Nicaea, and it was there the first Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church met at the Hagia Sophia in the year 325. But the Islamist government of Turkey has put a damper on the prosperity of those who profited from the museum by formally converting the building into a mosque.” Read more.