OUT OF PUBLIC LIFE WITH THE CHRISTIANS….
CAN QUICKLY TURN TO DEATH TO CHRISTIANS!
We have the Amandala calling for Christians to be removed from the public life of Belize. This is how it then grows to death to Christians. It has been done that way through out the history of the world.
The most notorious killer of Christians is the Muslim world, even now TODAY!
It almost happened to me by some Muslim Egyptian students who were summer students in laceName>FloridalaceName> laceType>StatelaceType> laceType>UniversitylaceType>. It started so nice: I was sitting in my fraternity house kitchen, it was early in the morning, I was alone and enjoying a glass of ice tea. When in walks one of the Egyptian boys talking like a used car salesman. Smiles and happy handshakes. He sat down at the table, and said he was trying to find out how Americans thought, and said would it be all right if he asked me a few questions. Following that up with the statement, don’t worry about my answers all he wanted to know was how we think. Ok, I said I will try to answer what you want to know. He thanked me, smiling, and said again “don’t worry about your answer, all I want is to see how you American think.” “No problem”, I answered. No realizing what I was getting into, after all what does a 17 year old know about Egypt and their religion. His first question was: “What do you think about Mohamed?
I paused for a moment! Wow I said to myself that could be a problem. But he seemed to sense my problem and said again, with one of the biggest smiles you could ever possibly see: “Don’t worry about a thing; I just want to know what you think.”
Well OK, I answered, as you may know I am a Christian I answered, and if I am to be true to my belief that Jesus is God, then I would have to say that Mohamed is a false prophet.”
That Egyptian leaped straight up into the air from his chair, shouting some Egyptian language. Picked up the chair and slammed it against the wall smashing it to bits. Ran out the door and down the hall screaming to the top of his voice. Soon the sound of many voices were heard all screaming in Egyptian coming back up the hall toward me (still sitting at the table with my glass of ice tea). Bang, wham the door was slung open and about 15 Egyptians poured into the room….now some of the language turned to English as they said I must die!!!
You know sometimes it is funny, what one may think during times like that, but going through my head was the thought: “Damn Daniel, you have just become a martyr for Christ!”
In a matter of seconds, the door at the other side of the kitchen swing open and in pouring in were about 20 Syrians, also staying at our frat house for summer studies. They too, were screaming in Arabian, and I said to myself: “Gee that doesn’t look like the cavalry has come to the rescue.” At that moment, one of the Syrians told me: “Don’t worry about a thing, we won’t let them kill you, we hate Egyptians and have been looking to get them since we got here.
The fight was on! Several guys were knocked out and lying on the floor, pots and pans were flying in all directions, blood was flowing! I stood up and said: “I’ll see you guys later” and walked out of the room, left the building.
The next day the house mother asked me what did I do, and I answered all I did was answer a question!
The Egyptians were quietly asked to leave the university, and the whole thing was covered up as much as possible.
BUT, if I had been in Egypt I WOULD have been killed! The Muslim world has long history of doing just that!
Let us look at a few incidents during the past year:
A typical incident occurred in the town of Sangla Hill, Pakistan, when Yousuf Masih, a Christian, won a substantial sum of money playing cards with a Muslim neighbor. The sore loser went to the police and accused Masth of setting fire to a copy of the Koran. Local imans used mosque loudspeakers to demand retribution, a mob was duly assembled, three Christian churches were torched, a Catholic convent and a Christian elementary school were vandalized, local Christians had to flee, and the police force stood idly by.
Being accused of blasphemy (as I was in Florida, of all places) is only one of the many risks faced by the Christian community. Terrorist attacks on churches are common. In October 2001, attackers opened fire on a church at Bahawalpur, in southern Pakistan, killing 16 worshipers. In March 2002, a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad killed five people, including an American woman and her 17-year-old daughter. In December of that year, three girls died during a Christmas Day attack on a small church in Chianwala, in eastern Pakistan. Less lethal attacks are happening more or less every week. Last April, fire was set to two churches in two days: a Protestant church in Mian Chaanu, east of Multan; and a Catholic church in Jivanpura, west of Lahore. On February 15, during protest against the Danish cartoons, demonstrators ransacked three Christian high schools. On February 18, unidentified men attacked a popular Christian singer, A Nayyar and forced him to recite a profession of the Islamic faith.
In Egypt, supposedly a friend of the United States and the second-largest recipient of the U.S. taxpayers’ largesse, 7 million Christians (in a nation of 70 million people) experience harassment and persecution from both the government and various Islamic groups, such as the Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya. Islam is Egypt’s “state religion,” and Islamic schools receive state subsidies. Apostasy is not a crime, but the authorities treat it as such. When Hanaan Assofti, a 26 year old convert from Islam to Christianity, tried in 1992 to leave and seek asylum in Europe, she was arrested by state security officers at the Cairo airport. In 2003, Egyptian police arrested 22 converts and their helpers. Some were tortured, and one, Isam Abdul Fathr, died in custody. In 2005, Gaseer Mohamed Mahmoud was tortured by police and was told he would he would be imprisoned until he renounced Christianity. However, conversion from Christianity to Islam is encouraged. The pressure to do so is intense and often accompanied by offers of material reward.
When bribes fail, there is violence. In May 1992, Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya killed 14 Christians in a series of coordinated attacks. In September 1993, Christians were forced to flee four villages in Upper Egypt and abandon their properties. A series of attacks followed in 1996 and 1997, including the murder of ten Christians at laceName>MarylaceName> laceName>GuirguislaceName> laceType>ChurchlaceType> in the El Minya province. Not a single person was convicted of murder following the January 2000 massacre of 21 Coptic Christians in the laceType>villagelaceType> of laceName>Al KoshehlaceName>, and smaller scale massacres continue unabated.
The murder last February of Father Andrea Santoro in Trabzon, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, was a classic case of jihadism. Such are fairly rare nowadays, however, not because Turkish society has become enlightened and tolerant, but because there are practically no Christians left in the country. In 1955, the Greek minority – already reduced to a tiny remnant of what had been a community of over two million – suffered the worst ethno-religious riot in Europe since Kristallnacht. There are but 2,000 Greeks remaining in Turkey today, and, according to a Helsinki Watch mission that visited Turkey in October 1993, they still suffer harassment by police, discrimination, restrictions on religious freedom, limitations on the right to control charitable institutions, and the denial of their ethnic identity.
Elsewhere in the region, the picture is equally grim. Beleaguered Christians are leaving Iraq as fast as they can. In Lebanon, their numbers have collapsed, from a simple majority to an estimated 25 per cent in two generations. In the Palestinian territories, they have declined from one third of the Arab population a century ago to under two percent today. In his grim 2002 book, “The New Persecuted: Inquiries into Anti-Christian Intolerance in the New Century of Martyrs”, Antonio Socci provides evidence that an average of 160,000 Christians have been killed every year since 1990, almost all of them by Muslims. The author Mr. Socci laments the fact that this global persecution of Christianity is still in progress but in most cases is ignored by the mass media and Christians in other countries. Indeed, we have heard nothing here in Belize!
