Persecution

On September 15, 1963, four Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young African-American girls were killed, and many were wounded. Shock and anger galvanized a nation. Less than a year later, President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act that inexorably changed the lives of African-Americans for the better. On Saturday and Sunday, July 11-12, 2009, six churches in Baghdad were bombed. Six people lost their lives in one of the blasts, many more wounded. As of now no one believes that conditions of the persecuted Christian minority in Iraq will get any better. Within a matter of days, no one but the families whose lives have been shattered would even remember.

How could our collective radar screen go blank so quickly?

The patriots of our Revolutionary War relied on flickering lanterns in a steeple and a Midnight Ride in 1775 to warn that British troops were on the move across Boston’s Charles River. Enraged citizens of Iran instantly warned one another about the movements of the Basiji through email and Twitter. At least initially, they thwarted the mullah’s attempted lock-down on information. Using the new technologies, they instantly told the world about the extent of popular rage over the theft not just of an election but of their hopes of a better future. Many participants in the Green Revolution were buoyed by the solidarity of a shocked world that felt that they were witnessing, via the technological miracles of Internet 2.0, a massive Tiananmen Square. Ahmadinejad had the thugs, but the people had Twitter and Facebook and with it, the world’s rapt attention. more >>

NEW DELHI (Compass Direct News) – Only 24 people have been convicted a year after anti-Christian mayhem took place in India’s Orissa state, while the number of acquittals has risen to 95, compounding the sense of helplessness and frustration among surviving Christians.

Dr. John Dayal, secretary general of the All India Christian Council, called the trials “a travesty of justice.”

Last month a non-profit group, the Peoples Initiative for Justice and Peace (PIJP), reportedly found that as many as 2,500 complaints were filed with police following the violence in August-September 2008 in the eastern state’s Kandhamal district. The violence killed at least 100 people and burned more than 4,500 houses and over 250 churches and 13 educational institutions. It also rendered 50,000 people, mostly Christian, homeless. more >>

Nine church leaders from the destroyed Fushan Chinese megachurch were kidnapped by local public security officials, according to a rights group on Tuesday.

The leaders from the Fushan Church were traveling to Beijing to seek justice from the central government over the recent destruction of their church by local authorities when they were apprehended and kidnapped, according to ChinaAid Association.

They have not been heard from since Friday. more >>

DHAKA, Bangladesh, September 24 (Compass Direct News) – Authorities are investigating possible motives for the vicious killing of a church worker by students at Dhaka University.

A management student at the university and his friends are accused of torturing and killing Swapan Mondol, 35, on Sept. 12 in Suhrawardy Park, adjacent to the university. Mondol, a convert from Hinduism, was supervisor of youth mission for Free Christian Church of Bangladesh (FCCB).

The primary suspect’s friends claim they came to his aid after Mondol stole his cell phone, a scenario that Mondol’s wife and police said they doubt. His wife, Lucky Mondol, told Compass that she does not know why they killed her husband. more >>

ISTANBUL, Sept. 23 (Compass Direct News) – A funeral for a Coptic Christian gruesomely killed on a village street north of Cairo by a Muslim assailant last week turned into a protest by hundreds of demonstrators in Egypt.

Galal Nasr el-Dardiri, 35, attacked 63-year-old Abdu Georgy in front of the victim’s shop in Behnay village the afternoon of Sept. 16, according to research by a local journalist. Other Copts watched in horror as El-Dardiri stabbed Georgy five times in the back, according to interviews by Gamal Gerges, a reporter for newspaper Al-Youm al-Sabeh.

As Georgy fell to the ground, El-Dardiri took his knife and stabbed him four times in the stomach. He then disemboweled him, slit his throat and began sawing off his head, according to Gerges. The Rev. Stephanos Aazer, a Coptic priest who knew Georgy and saw photographs of his mutilated body, said the victim’s head was attached to the body by a small piece of flesh. more >>