Human Rights

Muammar Gaddafi's death should send a signal to other tyrants that they are likely to lose their power the way they obtained it – by force, says one evangelical leader.

"We've seen this story over and over again," Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a podcast Friday. "Tyrants tend to gain their power only by military means and they tend to lose their power only by those same military means."

Gaddafi, who ruled Libya for 42 years, was killed Thursday after being captured by troops from the National Transitional Council in his hometown of Sirte. It has not yet been confirmed how exactly the events leading to his death unfolded, but CNN reports that he was shot as his captors tried to load him into a vehicle and drive away. more >>

SANTA ANA, Calif. – Ongoing violence against Christians in Iraq has produced an accelerated exodus of believers recently and numbering in the hundreds of thousands over the last 10 years, said Open Doors USA officials.

Members of the Orange County, Calif.-based organization that provides help to persecuted believers in Jesus worldwide say that while the world’s attention has shifted to such countries as Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the mass movement of Christians in Iraq continues unabated.

Before the Gulf War in 1991, the number of Christians was about one million, stated Open Doors in a news release. “That number fell to an estimated 850,000 in 2003 at the start of the U.S.-led invasion that ended the Saddam Hussein regime. Since then the numbers have plummeted. more >>

A Middle East Church leader has expressed his concern for Christians and the potential adverse consequences that could result from increased pressure by the Syrian government, and especially if violence escalates into a fully blown civil war.

The Syriac Catholic Church’s Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan told the Catholic News Service, "This chaos, surely – with no means to implement security – will lead to civil war," said the patriarch, who stressed that a civil war in Syria would not merely be a struggle among political parties to control the power.

"It will be confessional (religious), and war in the name of God is far worse than a political struggle. And this is what we fear." more >>

An army of pro-life evangelists on Facebook has helped push a 33-minute anti-abortion video to one million views, said the social media manager for Living Waters, the ministry that produced the film.

The dramatic film “180,” which was released less than a month ago, catches the responses of young adults to a series of questions by evangelist Ray Comfort in which he begins by asking whether they know who Adolf Hitler is and the fact that he sanctioned the killing of 11 million people.

While interviewing those with a pro-abortion stance, Comfort transitions from talk about lives lost in the Holocaust to lives lost as the result of abortions in the United States. Comfort recently said he was sickened by the answers so many young people gave to a hypothetical question he asked them after describing a life and death, Holocaust-like scenario. more >>

Placing Iranian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani’s case into the hands of high Supreme Leader Ali Khameini could make or break Nadarkhani’s chances of an acquittal.

“Whatever decision is made there will be a hefty amount of people who are not happy with it,” Todd Nettleton, director of media development for Voice of the Martyrs USA, told The Christian Post.

Nadarkhani, a Christian pastor in Iran, was arrested in October 2009 for protesting. His charge was later changed to apostasy, or preaching Christianity to Muslims. He was found guilty in the lower, local court of the Gilan Province. After appealing his case to the Supreme Court, officials gave Nadarkhani an ultimatum: "renounce your faith or die." more >>

Many influential politicians and officials in America are calling on Iran to stop the execution of Iranian Christian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani for apostasy, but that has not helped his case even a bit, the pastor’s lawyer said.

“They (the courts) work on the evidence and Iranian law,” CNN quoted Nadarkhani’s lawyer Mohammad Dadkah as saying Friday. “I don’t think the statements from the United States has had any impact either on this case as this is all going through the Iranian justice system, which is based on the law and evidence.”

The evangelical pastor, from the Church of Iran denomination, was convicted of apostasy last year and was sentenced to death by hanging. more >>