"Their Goal Is Really to Eradicate Christianity": Persecution of Christians, June 2021

by Raymond Ibrahim • August 8, 2021 at 5:00 am

A Muslim father of four abducted a 13-year-old Christian girl, forced her to convert to Islam, and then "married" her.... He had also promised to pay the girl Rs.10,000 (US $63) per month for her services, but stopped paying her after a couple of months.... She told her grandmother that she wanted to go home and was willing to sign anything to do so.... The following day, a visibly battered Nayab appeared before court and reaffirmed that she was 19 years old and had converted to Islam of her own free will. — Pakistan.
[N]early a million people have been displaced since 2017 and thousands slaughtered.... "They say their goal is to set up a caliphate similar to ISIS in Iraq and Syria.... They ask, 'Are you a Christian? Or are you a Muslim?' If you're a Christian, you're killed. If you're a Muslim, then you get the opportunity to quote some Quranic verses. And if you can quote them sufficiently, you save your life. Otherwise, you also get killed [sometimes by crucifixion]." — Todd Nettleton, The Voice of the Martyrs USA, Mission Network News, June 28, 2021, Mozambique.
Five Muslims entered the hospital he worked in, seized and left with him, and then killed him and left his body in the bush... "His killers, who are herdsmen, came to the hospital, specifically asked for [the Christian doctor] .... collected his money, took him away, and killed him without asking for ransom. What did he do wrong?.... Everyone loved him, always smiling, and he was one of the most hard-working persons I have ever known. His hospital boomed because he was saving lives. If you had any problems, Emeka would be there to help." — Morning Star News, June 21, 2021, Nigeria.
"Armed groups are destroying schools and hospitals. Teachers and pupils are being killed. They are even killing the sick as they lie in their hospital beds. Not a day goes by without people being killed... Many people are traumatized... A large-scale project is underway to Islamize or expel the indigenous populations. Anyone who has been kidnapped by these terrorist groups and managed to escape from them alive has told the same story. They were given the choice between death and converting to Islam." — Bishop Paluku, Catholic World Report, July 28, 2021, Democratic Republic of Congo

On May 30, Egyptian authorities seized land belonging to the ancient Coptic Monastery of Saint Macarius (pictured), originally founded in 360 CE — nearly 300 years before Islam invaded and conquered Egypt in the seventh century. Authorities arrived with bulldozers and police at the monastery in the deserts of Wadi al-Rayan in Fayum and demolished a fence of the annex-farm and other structures — including a church — that had been erected by the monks living there. Several monks who protested, or who tried to prevent this state-sanctioned destruction, were arrested. (Image source: Faris knight/Wikimedia Commons)

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of June 2021:

Pakistan

The Rape, Forced Conversion, and Child Marriage of Christians

A Muslim father of four abducted a 13-year-old Christian girl, forced her to convert to Islam, and then "married" her. According to the father of Nayab Gill, when the beauty school she was attending shut down due to the Covid-19 lockdown, Saddam Hayat, a local Muslim who ran his own beauty shop, "told me that rather than wasting time, Nayab should learn salon skills to help her in supporting the family financially. He even offered to pick her up from home and drop her off after work, assuring us that she was just like his daughter."

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Lebanon and its Ticking Bombs

by Amir Taheri • August 8, 2021 at 4:00 am

Lebanon's problems are deeply political. The consensus on which the Lebanese state was founded from the start has been badly shaken. Formal government structures have been duplicated, and at times replaced, by shadowy organs answerable to no one except, perhaps, foreign paymasters. The minimum rule of law that had survived many upheavals including a full-scale civil war has been replaced by the rule of the gunman.
The outside world cannot abandon Lebanon to its fate.
On the positive side, the region and beyond in the world needs Lebanon as a haven of contact, dialogue and peace, while a Lebanon turned into a platform for "exporting revolution" and real terror, along with drugs and dirty money, could harm everyone around or close to the Mediterranean basin.

Lebanon's problems are deeply political. The consensus on which the Lebanese state was founded from the start has been badly shaken. Formal government structures have been duplicated, and at times replaced, by shadowy organs answerable to no one except, perhaps, foreign paymasters. The minimum rule of law that had survived many upheavals including a full-scale civil war has been replaced by the rule of the gunman. Pictured: France's President Emmanuel Macron attends a virtual Lebanon donors' conference with representatives of international institutions and heads of state, from Bormes-Les-Mimosas, France, on August 4, 2021. (Photo by Christophe Simon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

In international politics, what do you do when you don't know what to do but wish to appear to be doing something?

The answer is: you convene an international conference.

The gimmick started with the notorious Versailles Conference after the First World War that morphed into a series of photo-ops while real decisions were taken elsewhere and behind the scenes. More recently we had the grand Madrid Conference that was supposed to produce an unlikely peace in the Middle East but became an introduction to a new era of conflict in the war-torn region. Last week we have had a virtual version of the international conference on Lebanon, the second in 12 months and designed to mark the anniversary of the deadly explosion that tore Beirut apart.

The explosion shocked many, including France's President Emmanuel Macron, out of years of inattention to the many time-bombs that were ticking in Lebanon for almost three decades.

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