The time has long since come to put
‘political correctness’ aside and speak frankly about who's killing Christians
and why.
Wealthy Kenyans and Westerners
bustled about Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi the other week. Families ate lunch in the food court. A radio station targeting Kenyan Asians was
hosting a children’s event on the roof of the parking lot. Around noon, armed gunmen stormed the mall and
exploded grenades. Thousands of
terrified people dropped to the floor, fled out of exits and hid in stores. The gunmen began lining people up and shooting
some of the five dozen people they would slaughter and some 175 people … ages 2
to 78 … that they would wound. Al-Shabaab,
which is claiming credit for the attack, is reported to have singled out non-Muslims.
“A witness to the attacks says that
gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave and that non-Muslims would be targeted,”
according to the Associated Press. To weed out the infidels, according to news
reports, the terrorists asked people for the name of Muhammad’s mother or to
recite a verse from the Quran. The Washington Post reported that one
British mother and her young children survived when captors who shot her
allowed her to leave on the condition she immediately convert to Islam. The siege of the mall, which included the
taking of hostages, lasted 4-days. Three
floors of the mall collapsed and bodies were buried in the rubble. And that wasn’t even the worst terrorist
attack of the weekend.
The next day, two suicide bombs went
off as Christians were leaving Sunday services at All Saints Anglican Church in
Peshawar, Pakistan. “There were blasts
and there was hell for all of us,” Nazir John, who was at the church with at
least 400 other worshipers, told the Associated
Press. “When I got my senses back, I
found nothing but smoke, dust, blood and screaming people. I saw severed body parts and blood all
around.” Some 85 Christians were
slaughtered and 120 injured, the bloodiest attack on Christians in Pakistan in
history. The hospital ran out of beds
for the injured and there weren’t enough caskets for the dead.
The situation for Christians in
Egypt has also gone from bad to worse. August
saw the worst anti-Christian violence in 7-centuries. Sam Tadros, a Coptic Christian and author of Motherland Lost, says that there has
been nothing like this year’s Muslim Brotherhood anti-Christian persecution since
1321 … when a similar wave of church burnings and torment caused the decline of
the Christian community in Egypt from nearly half of Egypt’s population to its
current 10%. The violence of just three
days in mid-August was staggering: 38 churches were destroyed, 23 vandalized;
58 homes were burned and looted; and 85 shops, 16 pharmacies and 3 hotels were
demolished. It was so bad that the
Coptic Pope was in hiding, many Sunday services were canceled, and Christians
stayed indoors … fearing for their lives. Six Christians were killed in the violence. Seven were kidnapped.
Maalula, Syria, is an ancient
Christian town that has been so sheltered for 2,000 years that it’s one of only
three villages where people still speak Aramaic – the language of Jesus – until
September 7, when Islamist rebels attacked as part of the civil war ripping
through the country. An eyewitness to
the murder of three Christians in Maalula (Mikhael Taalab, his cousin Antoun
Taalab, and his grandson Sarkis el Zakhm) reported that the Islamists warned
everyone present to convert to Islam. Sarkis
answered clearly, Vatican news agency Fides
reported: “I am a Christian and if you want to kill me because I am a
Christian, do it.” Sister Carmel, one of
the Christians in Damascus who assist Maalula’s many displaced Christians, told
Fides, “What Sarkis did is true
martyrdom, a death in odium fidei.”
Some U.S. elites continue to insist
that the ‘war on terror’ has nothing to do with Islam. Tell that to the jihadists. Tell that to the nearly 500 victims of these
deadly attacks. Here we have Muslims
killing Christians in Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan and Syria.
Again, it’s time to ask an important
question that many have avoided for far too long: Can we finally start talking
about the global persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims?
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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