Free Republic

THE CARPENTER'S SHOP: Persecution of Christians affects millions worldwide By Dr. Barry K. Carpenter Published: Friday, September 19, 2014 at 11:03 AM. Christians around the world are experiencing unprecedented persecution. Reporter and news analyst Kirsten Powers, interviewed in the Daily Beast, said, “Christians in the Middle East and Africa are being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity. The silence has been nearly deafening.” It seems open season on Christians. It is more pronounced, more bold, more contagious, and in more numbers than at any other time in history. It may appear to...

The situation for Christians in the Middle East continues to get worse, but this time, it isn’t at the hands of a terrorist group or band of rebels. It’s from one of our supposed allies in the region: Saudi Arabia. As Fox News reports, this past Friday (September 12th), agents from the country’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice rounded up 28 Christians at the home of an Indian national in the city of Khafji, and several Bibles were confiscated as well.. Their condition and whereabouts are currently unknown. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute...

A new policy put in place by Cal State University could cost InterVarsity and other Christian groups up to $460,000 to meet on campus because they cannot change their leadership requirements to include any student. "No campus shall recognize any fraternity, sorority, living group, honor society, or other student organization unless its membership and leadership are open to all currently enrolled students at that campus," the policy states. The rule requires leadership positions to be open to any student, regardless of whether they hold the same beliefs as the Club. The policy went into effect in 2012 but up until...

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has sought to encourage Iraq's beleaguered Christians under threat from Islamic militants, saying they are the "heart" of the church and that the church is proud of them. In comments translated into Arabic during his weekly Wednesday general audience, Francis said the Catholic Church is like a mother, and like any mother will "defend her defenseless and persecuted children." Francis has said it was legitimate to use force to stop the militants..."The church suffers with you and is proud of you."

Reciting a list of assaults on Christians around the world, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder told a large-scale gathering of Israel’s Christian allies that he would continue to speak out against the violence and oppression that is engulfing Christians, especially in the Middle East. Speaking in Budapest on June 15, Lauder said “I will speak out across the globe with world leaders and with ordinary citizens, and I will tell them that we will never tolerate any kind of anti-Christian threats, just as we will not tolerate anti-Semitism.” He was speaking at the Jerusalem Day Convention at the...

How many times have we heard: “Never again”? (Or taken selfies at a concentration camp or Holocaust museum with those words?) How often have we quoted: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”? And yet: Do we do nothing? What do we actually say in the face of evil? “I don’t want to have on my conscience that I was complicit in something as horrendous as this simply by being quiet,” is how Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., reflected on the persecution being conducted against Christians and other...

A federal appeals court ruled against a group of Christian evangelists who were forced to leave an Arab-American street festival in Dearborn, Michigan, in 2012. Festival-goers threw rocks and water bottles at members of the Bible Believers group when they denounced Islam and called Mohammed a false prophet. In response, Wayne County authorities threatened to ticket the Christian group if they did not leave. On Wednesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed county authorities, ruling 2-1 that police were only trying to keep public order. "The video from the 2012 festival demonstrates that (evangelists') speech and conduct intended...

Christians persecuted by Muslims in Islamic countries who think they are escaping their fate by fleeing discover that the same treatment awaits them in Europe, which after all has simply imported Islam's barbarism by opening its doors to large numbers of Muslims. The German daily newspaper Die Welt reports on the terrible exclusion and violence suffered by Christian refugees at the hands of Muslims in Germany's asylum centres. Germany is the second country in the world, after the US, for number of asylum applications received, with 13% of them last year, and the first in Europe, with 23.2% last...

The Vatican has found its voice. Pope Francis wrote a letter to Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General, asking him to "do everything you can to stop the violence against Christians in Iraq". The letter, received by Ban Ki-Moon on 13 August, is the latest of the PopeÂ’s interventions to stop the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq. He writes: It is with a heavy and anguished heart that I have been following the dramatic events of these past few days in Northern Iraq where Christians and other religious minorities have been forced to flee from their...

Beheadings. Crucifixions. Thousands of refugees.It can seem hopeless reading these news reports of violence and persecution of Christians in the Middle East from afar. Is there anything we can do?Yes, and fortunately it’s one of the most powerful: prayer.There are obviously many ways to pray, and any prayer made in the name of Jesus is powerful. This is just a list of prayers that may be particularly effective or relevant to this situation.Some of the things listed here may make more sense for Christians who are part of older, more liturgical traditions (Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, etc.). But even if these...

I was curious so I went to FaceBook.com and did a search for "people who live in Mosul Iraq" Hundreds of people who have their FaceBook accounts came up. This brought a whole new dimension of their suffering. They were no longer just bloody corpses that you see lying in the dust. They were no longer just some statistic that I'd hear about. Rather, you'd see they were just normal human beings living their lives, so similar to us. Here: lots of pictures of this brother and sister until 2014. Wonder if they are alive? https://www.facebook.com/sarmid.alshmani?fref=browse_search This one posts lots...

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered,...

Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese Orthodox Christian who was nearly executed for her faith, was all smiles and her husband, Daniel Wani, in tears, when they and their two young children finally arrived home Thursday night — in Manchester, New Hampshire. Wani, who lives in the city along with his brother and extended family, was overcome by emotion upon encountering the celebratory welcome by members of the local Sudanese Evangelical Covenant Church. The Sudanese national reportedly shared "how happy he was that he and his family were on safe ground." The couple landed at the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport just after 8...

A born-again Christian who was fired from South Tipperary County Council has been awarded €70,000 compensation after the Equality Tribunal found he was discriminated against over his religion. According to the council, John McAteer was dismissed after repeatedly failing to comply with senior staff members who told him to stop speaking about his faith to workers and members of the public during office hours. Mr McAteer said the tenets of his religion require him to speak to people about Jesus and share the Gospel with them. The complainant had been working as a civil engineer in the Clonmel Borough Council...

[Cross removed this week from dome of Syriac Orthodox Cathedral, Mosul, Iraq] For two thousand years, our dearest brethren saw it all from Mosul: Romanized Greeks, Hellenized Persians, Hellenized Romans from all origins later called "Byzantines", Armenians, Arabs from the desert with a religion of the sword, Egyptians, Crusaders, Mongols, Turks, French and British, "Independence"... Then the clumsiest Empire in history, an Empire unwanted by most voters, unwarranted by the Republic's own Constitution, led by bellicose hawks motivated by God knows what, justifying their actions on untruths, arrived, upsetting a balance that was not the best, but was best...

When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003, there were at least 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Over the last ten years, significantly in the last few months with the emergence of ISIS, that figure has dropped to about 400,000. In a region where Christians predate Muslims by centuries, over one million Christians have been killed or have had to flee because of jihadi persecution, while America is basically standing by and watching. This is the sad news that Breitbart’s National Security Editor and one of the world’s leading experts on asymmetric warfare, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, brought to Breitbart News Saturday,...

US policy regarding the UN picks who becomes US refugees. Christians are being refused refugee status and face persecution and many times certain death for their religious beliefs under the sharia, while whole Muslim communities are entering the US by the tens of thousands per month despite the fact that they face no religious persecution. It is horrifying that Afghan Christians are being refused refugee status by the UN and many Western nations, including Britain. The UN claims that Afghan Christians do not meet the criteria for refugees under Statute 6B of the UN High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR), which...

http://www.persecutedmovie.com/trailer

The Jerusalem District Court has ordered Moshav Yad Hashmonah, a community of Messianic Jews and Evangelical Christians, to pay compensation to two lesbians after it refused to host a same-sex wedding reception. "We knew we were breaking the law. Somebody needed to do it." says Ayelet Ronen, general secretary for the village. Judge Moshe Yoad Cohen upheld a lower court ruling that the Moshav violated a law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. During the trial, representatives of the Moshav quoted from both Old and New Testaments. "We do not hate homosexuals or lesbians. We love them. We simply told...

Salem officials declared Wednesday they will end a contract allowing Gordon College to use the city-owned Old Town Hall because of the Christian school’s opposition to expected federal hiring protection for gays and lesbians. Mayor Kimberley Driscoll, who also cited the college’s longstanding policies prohibiting gay activities among students, said Gordon’s policies violate a city ordinance prohibiting Salem from contracting with entities that discriminate. But she said it would be “even more troubling” to have the city do business with “an institution that enables, and now advocates for, discrimination against the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] community...” The college’s website...