NAIROBI, Kenya, March 7 (Compass Direct News) – At least one Christian was killed and others injured when thousands of Islamic extremists set fire to 59 churches and at least 28 homes in western Ethiopia in the past five days, Christian leaders said.
More than 4,000 Christians in and around Asendabo, Jimma Zone have been displaced as a result of attacks that began on Wednesday (March 2) after Muslims accused a Christian of desecrating the Quran by tearing up a copy, sources said.
“The atrocity is still going on, and more people are suffering,” said a source in Addis Ababa who is in close contact with area church leaders.
The Christian killed, believed to have been a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, has not yet been identified.
“One Orthodox believer, whose daughter is a member of Mekane Yesus Church, has been killed,” an Ethiopian church leader told Compass. “Ministers were injured, and many more believers have been displaced.”
A pastor based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa noted that evangelical church leaders have reported the attacks to authorities and asked officials for help, but no action had been taken at press time.
“The church requested more police protection,” he said. “The authorities sent security forces, but they were overwhelmed by the attackers.”
A hardline Muslim mob clashed with police and burned two churches in Indonesia Tuesday to protest what they considered a too-lenient sentence given a Christian for blaspheming against Islam.
The U.S. ambassador in Jakarta expressed concern about the burnings and also deplored an earlier mob attack on a minority Muslim sect in which three people were stabbed and beaten to death.
The Christian, 58-year-old Antonius Bawengan, was given the maximum five-year sentence Tuesday on charges of distributing books and literature that allegedly spread hatred about Islam.
But a crowd estimated at more than 1,000 people attacked police with stones outside the courthouse in central Java, saying the man should have received a death penalty. The mob then set two churches on fire, burning the roofs, and damaged a third.
JAKARTA, Indonesia – Violations of Christians’ religious freedom in Indonesia jumped from 12 incidents in 2009 to 75 last year, according to a report from the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace.
Setara Institute researcher Ismail Hasani said at a press conference last week that 43 incidents involved attacks on churches and other security threats, sealing of worship venues and prohibition of activities, among other violations. Other incidents among the 75 violations included blocking churches from establishing places of worship and banning services and other religious activities.
NEW DELHI, INDIA (BosNewsLife)– Suspected Islamic militants have killed two Christian teenagers who were reading the Bible in the disputed Kashmir valley, divided between India and Muslim Pakistan, BosNewsLife established Tuesday, January 8.
The victims were identified as Arifa, 17, and Akthar, 19, the daughters of Gulam Nabi Dar, said local missionary Mercy Ciniraj, who knew them well. “The [murdered] girls were believers and used to read the Bible through underground ministries.”
She told BosNewsLife that “the girls were shot dead” last Monday, January 31, in the Baramulla area in Indian-controlled northern Kashmir, bordering Pakistan.
They were “brutally murdered” by at least three fighters of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan based Islamic militant “terrorist” group, she explained. Local police reportedly said in statements that they found two bodies near their home and that militants were to blame.
ISLAMIC STATE
Lashkar-e-Taiba, or the ‘Army of the Righteous’, seeks to introduce an Islamic state in South Asia and to “liberate” Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
India has identified the group as the alleged masterminds behind the the 2008 terror attack on the Indian financial capital of Mumbai that killed 166 people.
The killings of Arifa and Akthar show that militant attacks also include targetting devoted minority Christians, Ciniraj suggested.
The girls’ involvement in Bible reading was among several projects of mission group Salem Voice Ministries (SVM), which supports evangelism and aid among MuslimsHindus in India, including through underground house churches in Muslim-majority Kashmir. and
BELIEVERS IN FEAR
After last week’s killings, however, local “believers are totally in fear,” added Ciniraj, who founded SVM with her husband, Indian pastor Paul Ciniraj, a former Muslim.
The January 31 attack was believed to be the first incident of civilian killings by militants in the Kashmir valley, this year. The violence also added to other difficulties of Christians in Kashmir valley, as they suffered of diseases, explained Mercey Ciniraj to BosNewsLife.
“Since the last one and half months we all are fed up with different types of sickness. Few days we suffered with reddish eyes one by one [and] after that we were attacked with viral fever too,” she said, adding that local believers asked for prayers.
Despite their concerns, local Christian workers plan to continue preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ who they believe gives eternal life to everyone who believes in Him, Ciniray stressed. “By God’s grace now we recovered [of illnesses] and are fully active with the underground church ministries and reaching the Gospel at any cost who never have a chance to hear it.”
This following video is VERY GRAPHIC and I do not recommend it for the faint of heart. It is Islamic violence against fellow Muslims (maybe a sharia law killing? Or the people being killed were moderate Muslims?). You can see that this religion of death feeds on itself as well as other faiths, and non-faiths for that matter. You can watch it HERE.
The Daily Beast contributor who once insisted that there’s “no such thing as sharia law” is at it again, dismissing the threat of radical Islam presented by the political instability in Egypt.
In a January 30 post at Washington Post/Newsweek’s “On Faith” feature yesterday, Reza Aslan dismissed fears that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical group that could take Egypt in a theocratic direction should strongman Hosni Mubarak be forcibly ousted from power, even though members of the Brotherhood have expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden.
GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum is already drawing parallels between the young protesters calling for an end to the brutal and repressive Mubarak regime, and the popular protests that, three decades ago, brought down another despicable dictator and former American ally, the Shah of Iran. “We abandoned [the Shah] and what we got in exchange was… a radical Islamist regime,” Santorum said. Mike Huckabee, another GOP presidential hopeful, joined in the hysteria, warning Americans that, “if in fact the Muslim Brotherhood is underneath much of the unrest [in Egypt] every person who breathes ought to be concerned.”
[…]
[H]owever the current uprising in Egypt turns out, there can be no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt. And that is good thing.
Despite the wide array of political and religious views on display on the streets of Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, and Suez, the one thing about which the overwhelming majority of Egyptians agree – 95 percent according to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll – is that Islam should play a role in the country’s politics. At the same time, a similar Pew poll taken in 2006 found that while the majority of the Western public thought democracy was “a Western way of doing things that would not work in most Muslim countries,” pluralities or majorities in every single Muslim-majority country surveyed flatly rejected that argument and called for democracy to be immediately established, without conditions, in their own societies.
For Huckabee and Santorum, as well as for a large segment of the American public, these two polls present a contradiction. How could Egyptians want both a democracy and a role for religion in their government? After all, in the United States it is axiomatic that Islam is inherently opposed to democracy and that Muslims are incapable of reconciling democratic and Islamic values. Never mind that the same people who scoff at the notion that religion could play no role in the emerging democracies in the Middle East are the same people who demand that religion must play a role in America’s democracy. Ironically, one of the most vocal proponent of religious activism in politics is Mike Huckabee himself, who has repeatedly called Americans to “take this nation back for Christ” and who, while running for president, proudly declared that “what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.”
In fact, when it comes to the role of religion in society, Americans and Egyptians are pretty well in agreement. An August 2010 Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans believe that churches should express political views and play an active role in politics, while 61 percent agreed that “it is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs.”
There is no doubt that giving religiously inclined organizations and politicians a seat at the political table poses risks. And certainly, problems can arise when religion becomes entangled with the state, as those who recall the Bush administration’s evangelistic foreign policy can attest. Nevertheless, since a state can be considered democratic only insofar as it reflects its society, if the society is founded upon a particular set of values, then must not its government be also?
Of course Aslan (different from CS Lewis’ Azlan) is a radical in disguise. For instance, Jihad Watch has this story of Prof. Aslan calling Ahmadinejad a “liberal reformer.” I have posted on UC Irvine in the past, and since then the Muslim Student Union was suspended for their blatant antisemitism. Below is another event that went wrong at UC Irvine:
A survey of 600 Islamic and 800 non-Islamic students at 30 universities found that 32 percent of the Muslims believed in religious killing, while only 2 percent of non-Muslim students felt religious murder was justified
Nearly one-third of Muslim college students in Britain support killing in the name of religion, while 40 percent want to live under Islamic law, according to a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy in London that reviewed public polling data and government population predictions.
A survey of 600 Islamic and 800 non-Islamic students at 30 universities found that 32 percent of the Muslims believed in religious killing, while only 2 percent of non-Muslim students felt religious murder was justified, the cable said, referring to a poll conducted by the Center for Social Cohesion.
The embassy cable, released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, said the same survey revealed that 54 percent of Muslim students want to be represented by an Islamic-based political party.
The poll also showed that 40 percent of Muslim students endorse Islamic, or Shariah, law, which can impose the death penalty for religious heresy and adultery, often by stoning, or the amputation of hands for theft. Since 2008, Britain has allowed Muslims to follow Shariah law in civil cases, but not in criminal trials.
The embassy report, written in February, also noted that Muslims represent the largest non-Christian religious community in Britain. Although Muslims comprise only 3 percent of the British population of nearly 60 million, they have grown to 2 million from 1.6 million in seven years. The government projects the Muslim population will reach 2.2 million in the next census in 2011, the cable said.
