The War On Christians

Newsweek 18 February 2012 published an article with the above title by a 42-year-old woman who escaped Somalia in 1992 and lived in the Netherlands. She speaks 6 languages and served for a time as an MP in the Netherlands. She now resides in the United States. To read her bio, go to http://imdb.to/zAeaYp . (Her bio is, perhaps, the most interesting part of this post.)

In recent years, the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries, it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

In Nigeria, a Muslim organization called Boko Haram is spearheading the thrust to eliminate Christians from that country. In the month of January, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011, its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They used guns, gasoline bombs, and machetes. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, police officers, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication. Boko Haram has stated that its goal is to kill all Christians in Nigeria.

This kind of mayhem has been evident in Sudan, Egypt, the Middle East, Pakistan, the Punjab, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. To read more about this, go to http://bit.ly/ApSjFU.