Saving the Islamic World’s Christians
Saving the Islamic World’s Christians
ICC Note
It is high time for Christians in the West to support their persecuted brothers and sisters who live in Muslim countries.
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
07/24/2009 Islam (The Huffington Post)-Here’s a good question. Why do the majority of American Christians remain so oblivious to the increasingly bitter fate of their fellow Christians in the Islamic world? These ancient communities — many descended from the very earliest followers of Jesus himself — are under growing siege.
From the Middle East to the Sub-continent and Africa , the Islamic world’s Christians are being hounded, discriminated against, forced from their homes and in some cases, simply murdered.
In Egypt , where machete-armed fanatics have attacked worshipers in Coptic churches, it is still a crime to convert from Islam to Christianity. In Pakistan , Catholic and Protestant churches are frequently torched, Christian businessmen murdered and young Christian girls kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam and married off to Muslim men. In Saudi Arabia , where one irate father recently hacked his daughter to death for embracing Christianty, the existence of any churches is strictly forbidden as is the import of a bible or the wearing of a cross. Some foreign workers have been arrested, jailed and deported just for holding Christian prayer services in the privacy of their homes.
In fact, ironically, the only place in the Mideast where Christian communities continue to grow is in the Jewish State of Israel. Israel ‘s tolerance is logical. What people of faith know the dangers of religious persecution better than the people of Israel — especially those whose families originated in the Islamic world? Between 1948 and 1956 more than 850,000 Jews were forced to flee the Arab lands where their families had lived for centuries. Yet since 1949, the year after Israel ‘s birth, the number of Israeli Arab Christians has grown by an astonishing 345%!
With Islamic extremism still on the rise, this is one of the downs. Few Americans seem prepared to connect the dots. Some American evangelical groups like the Washington-based International Christian Concern try to raise the alarm. And America ‘s Copts, especially those based in the New York area, actively lobby against the legal and social discrimination that face their Egyptian co-religionists. Yet most mainstream church groups seem to ignore the threat.