"Convert, Marry Me, or Die": Persecution of Christians, July 2019

by Raymond Ibrahim • September 22, 2019 at 5:00 am

"How ready is the government to go up against certain groups that try to impose their own will on others." — Reverend Timotheus Halim, head of the Family of God Church ucanews.com, July 25, 2019, Indonesia.
Fatemeh Azad, a 58-year-old Muslim woman who had converted to Christianity against her Muslim husband's will and fled to Germany, was denied asylum there and deported back to Iran. There she was immediately arrested by authorities waiting for her plane to land.... "When Fatemeh made her asylum appeal, her lawyers argued that apostasy (conversion away from Islam) is punishable by the death penalty in Iran." This, however, was insufficient for Germany.... — Persecution.org; July 25, 2019.
Finally, a 14-year-old Christian girl was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, forced to marry a Muslim man, and then taken before a Muslim judge to sign a statement saying she had acted on her own free will...."[G]irls often give such statements because they are already living with their kidnappers," and "death threats are made towards their family, and therefore the victims have no choice but to say what their kidnapper wants them to say in court....." — Lawyer, AsiaNews.it; July 26, 2019; Pakistan.

On June 27, unidentified armed individuals entered the village of Bani, Burkina Faso, looking for Christians. When they found four men wearing crosses, "the assailants singled them out. All four were taken aside and executed." Pictured: Bani, Burkina Faso. (Image source: Adam Jones/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Slaughter of Christians

Syria: Islamic jihadis gang-raped a 60-year-old Christian woman before stoning her to death. When no one in Yaqoubiya, a small Christian village in Idlib governorate, saw Susan Grigor (or "Gregory") on July 9, the worried priest sent parishioners to search for her. They eventually found her mangled and bloodied corpse on the ground of a field adjacent to her home.

The autopsy revealed that Susan had been repeatedly raped and tortured over the course of nine hours before finally being murdered by stoning. The men responsible are believed to be members of the al-Qaeda-linked jihadi group, al-Nusra. Described as a pious Christian, Susan had never married and lived her entire life as a virgin. Although she never children, Susan reportedly loved them and, after retiring, volunteered much of her time helping educate the youths of her local church.

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When Negotiation Is Impossible and War Is Unnecessary

by Amir Taheri • September 22, 2019 at 4:00 am

It is likely that whoever planned the attacks was more interested in testing the waters, seeing how far it was possible to go in provocation...
What the mullahs did not realize was that the new status quo came at no cost to the Americans, who could thus afford to prolong it as far as needed. All that Trump did was announce that anyone trading with the Islamic Republic could not trade with the US, and that the US would no longer allow the mullahs to use American global banking and trade facilities.
In every case, the tyranny of the underdog worked and the mullahs managed to continue crushing their opponents at home and fattening their cohorts abroad while casting themselves as champions of the downtrodden resisting the diktats of the "Great Satan."
Khamenei's best hope is for Trump to go for a pin-prick operation that would shake but not topple the Khomeinist regime while mobilizing Iranian and international opinion in its support as a victim, thus forcing the easing of sanctions that are beginning to break the bones of his regime.

Will President Donald Trump fall for the claim that as far as the Iran is concerned the only choice is between full-scale war and surrender to the mullahs' agenda? No one, perhaps not even Trump himself, knows the answer. Pictured: President Trump on September 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Will the attacks on Saudi oil installations last week upset the status quo that has taken shape in the past 17 months, that is to say, since President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the "Iran nuke deal" concocted by Barack Obama?

The headline-grabbing sensationalism of the attacks, largely attributed to the Islamic Republic of Iran but denied by the mullahs, may suggest "yes" as an answer. A closer look, however, might suggest a more nuanced reply. It is likely that whoever planned the attacks was more interested in testing the waters, seeing how far it was possible to go in provocation without making a crushing response inevitable, rather than a serious attempt at upsetting the status quo.

However, first, let us see what we mean by the new status quo, which has replaced the one created by Obama in his final years in office.

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