The Underreported Persecution Of Christians

By: Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
10/19/2007

There’s an uncivilized and widespread persecution and discrimination of one religious group going on in the Middle East, as well as such places as Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria and the Philippines. The zone of persecution and murder extends to parts of Africa, Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
Yet, the mainstream media virtually ignores the story and the world is silent, without great protest or calls for action. Is this some obscure religion that is subjected to this unthinkable onslaught? No, it is the majority religion of the world, involving Christianity and Christians.
Of course, if you rely on the mainstream media for news and information, you may barely be aware of this phenomenon. That’s because the mainstream media is putting out such biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism – managed by editors with anti-American, anti-religion, anti-military, anti-conservative and anti-family values bias – that it has no time for one of the major outrages of recent history.

This issue was called to my attention by an extensive article on the subject by Lela Gilbert, one of the leading authorities on anti-Christian persecution. She is a co-author of Their Blood Cries Out and most recently author of Baroness Cox: Eye Witness to a Broken World, two books on the subject. She is now an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institutes’s Center for Religious Freedom www.crf.hudson.org .

Ms. Gilbert traveled to Israel with “the conviction that an assault upon Jews is an implicit assault upon Christians since it strikes at the root of the same ancient tree.” On her visit to Jerusalem, she soon started to focus on discrimination against Christians. She encountered “a kaleidoscope of pilgrims and sojourners,” more than a few of which were suffering from persecution under Muslim regimes.
As she observed the scene in Israel, she was struck by the similarity of Christian persecution in country after country, “evident not only in body count but in kidnapping and enslavement, rape, mutilation and torture.”
As she worked on two different writing projects involving persecution of the Christians, she noticed that neither cited abuse of Jews. Why? With few exceptions, the Jews have already been slaughtered, expelled or fled for their lives from these locations. Ms. Gilbert found that Middle Eastern Christians are fleeing from their homeland “at an accelerated rate and in ever increasing numbers.”

As these Christian communities are being driven to extinction, what is not recognized is that they are among the most ancient of Christian communities. These communities, contrary to a popular and erroneous impression, are not “colonial implants” of recent origin. Ms. Gilbert writes that in fact prior to the Muslim conquest of the mid-seventh century, “the large majority of the inhabitants of the area now divided into countries of Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco were Christians, including many Arab Christians. Even Arabia has major Christian communities in such places as present day Bahrain, Yemen, and the Najran area of western Arabia south of Mecca.

Go read it all!!!