Christians are fleeing the Iraqi city of Mosul after the Islamic terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria issued a “convert or die” order in the city.
The edict says that by Saturday all Christians in the city must convert to Islam, pay a large fine or be killed according to a statement read in mosques throughout the city.
“Christian families are on their way to Dohuk and Irbil,” Patriarch Louis Sako told AFP news agency. “For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians.”
Islamists have been going through the city marking the homes of Christians for easy identification.
Mosul reportedly contained around 35,000 Christians when the Islamic terrorist group launched their campaign to take over Iraq. Churches throughout the city have been ransacked and their possessions taken or burned.
The Islamists have also destroyed Christian or Jewish shrines or artifacts within the city, including the tomb of the Prophet Jonah.
A federal judge threw out a lawsuit this week from an atheist group angered over not being able to give uncensored pornographic material to students when Bibles were given out without censorship.
Senior Judge Kendall Sharpe said he threw out the lawsuit because of a change in school policy that allowed the atheists to eventually distribute their book “An X-Rated Sex Book: Sex & Obscenity In The Bible.”
The school had been permitting World Changers of Florida to deliver Bibles to students without interference or censorship when the atheists discovered the program and launched a series of complaints. The radically hostile anti-Christian group Freedom From Religion Foundation backed the atheist group.
The Central Florida Freethought Community says they plan to flood schools with more anti-Christian publications as a result of the court ruling.
The anti-Christian groups said despite the dismissal, the situation was a win for advancing the cause of removing Christians from society.
A group of Islamic extremists attacked two major Christian villages leaving at least 30 people dead in one attack and two men burned alive in the second.
The Morning Star News of Kenya reported that the Islamists attacked Covenant Church near Hindi after the close of a Bible study. Two men hid inside the building while the rest of the Christians fled the attack and were burned alive when the Islamists torched the building.
Less than 48 hours earlier, the same group of Islamists attacked near Gamba and Hindi, killing all they found after telling Muslims and non-Christians to leave the area or convert to Islam. One of the dead with a 12-year-old boy from a Christian primary school and other man who was executed point blank, put in a pool of his blood and then had a Bible jammed into his back.
One witness said the attackers bound their victims before killing them.
“I was removed with my daughter from the house while the attackers tied my husband to the bedside before setting the house on fire,” a survivor told Morning Star News. “The attackers…targeted non-Muslims, whom they tied with ropes before slitting their throats.”
The government confirmed most of the dead had their hands bound behind their backs and had their throats slit.
One of the students killed had a small blackboard placed next to the body that read “Kick Christians out [of] coast.”
A new report from the Pew Research Center shows that China and Russia are the top countries in the world for destruction of churches by government organizations.
Pew collected information on “demolition of houses of worship, and the seizure of religious groups’ property and government raids of houses of worship that result in property damage.”
China, which has been conducting very high profile crackdowns on Christian congregations in their country, only has 5 percent of the population calling themselves Christians according to the CIA World Factbook. Russia shows 15-20% of the population as Russian Orthodox and only 2% as just Christian.
The two nations were joined in third by Tajikistan, a 90 percent Muslim country, as having more than 100 documented cases of churches being destroyed by government groups.
The next tier (from 10 to 99 incidents) included Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan and Indonesia.
The only two nations in the Americas that were on the list of 10 or more churches destroyed was Cuba and Venezuela.
A California school district is being defiant in its refusal to apologize for infringing on the First Amendment rights of students by censoring God or Jesus from student led functions.
Attorneys representing the Brawley Union High School District wrote a 10 page letter defending the school’s right to silence students from mentioning God or Jesus at graduation.
“It is well established in the Ninth Circuit and California that a public school salutatorian has no constitutional right to lead a prayer or include sectarian or proselytizing content in his/her graduation speech,” the document reads.
The district is the place where 18-year-old Brooks Hamby made national headlines by standing up for his Christians beliefs and his right under the First Amendment to say the name of Jesus during a graduation ceremony speech. His lawyers have been demanding the school apologize for their infringement on his religious freedom.
“The district was legally obligated to ensure prayers and other sectarian, proseltyzing content were omitted from Mr. Hamby’s speech,” the school’s attorneys wrote. “Censorship of the speech was necessary to avoid an Establishment Clause violation.”
“I was really surprised the school would deny my speech not once, twice, but three times,” Hamby told Fox News Todd Starnes. “I just wanted to say a few nice words and allow people to see the good news – which is the Gospel.”
Islamic extremists attacked a church in the Central African Republic Monday, killing at least 17 and leaving dozens wounded.
Reverend Thibault Ndemaguia told the Associated Press the attackers came at St. Joseph Cathedral of Bambari because a Muslim youth had been killed in the area and they were claiming a Christian did the killing.
A statement from the Seleka Muslim militia appears to back the pastor’s view: the group said “all we did was retaliate.”
The church has been a refuge for thousands of Christians attempting to escape the ongoing civil war in the country. Rev. Ndemaguia says the church averages between 4,000 and 6,000 people seeking refuge from the battles.
The civil war in the nation began last year when a Muslim extremist group attacked and overthrew the country’s government that was mainly run by Christians. They tried to set up strict Sharia Law but eventually bowed out of power because of international pressures.
The virulent anti-Christian group Americans United for Separation of Church and State is again attempting to have a memorial removed because it has a cross in it.
A war memorial in King, North Carolina featured a Christian flag and a sculpture of a soldier kneeling before a cross. U.S. District Judge James A. Beaty ruled Tuesday there is sufficient evidence for the case to go to trial.
The “plaintiff” in the case is Steven Hewett, who is being represented by Americans United, who claims that the “King’s veterans’ memorial only honors Christian veterans.”
The Christian flag had been removed from the memorial in 2010 after the ACLU and Americans United both made threats against the city. The citizens of the community were outraged that organizations from outside the town were coming in to censor their free speech rights.
The flag was part of a lottery that the town held every year that allowed a veteran to choose what flag flew every week. Citizens United was angry that the majority of the time people chose to fly the Christian flag.
The American Legion as joined the case to defend the statue saying that the cross is a symbol of graves worldwide that thus it is not a violation of the Constitution.
The New York Times is being accused of showing their anti-Christian bias by accepting an ad that bashes Christians on the Supreme Court while they have rejected ads that were critical of Islam.
In 2012, a group of anti-Muslim activists had tried to place an ad in the Times critical of Islam and its stances on non-Muslims and treatment of women. The newspaper said they would not run the advertisement because they didn’t want to “inflame” Muslims with an ad critical of their faith.
Then Thursday, the virulent anti-Christian group Freedom From Religion Foundation was permitted to place an ad in the New York Times that personally disparaged the five justices on the Court who voted to uphold religious freedom by condemning them as “all being Roman Catholic.”
Matthew Balan, a news analyst for the Media Research Center, says while Times has every right to decide what ads to run in their newspaper, the fact they would allow a bigoted attack on Christians in an advertisement while denying an ad critical of Islam in any way shows their bias.
Catholic League statement Bill Donohue said that there were multiple examples of bigotry toward Catholics in the media following the ruling. He cited the Boston Herald that headlined a story “Court’s Catholic Justices Attack Women’s Rights.”
Congregants of the Church of Christ in the Thiba Al Hamyida area of Khartoum stood by helplessly as Sudanese government officials destroyed their church building.
A church member told CNN that the government came in during Sunday mass and said they would be destroying the building. About 70 security personnel, some armed with guns and tear gas, used a bulldozer to destroy the building.
“They wanted to beat us or throw tear gas on us,” the church member said.
Reverend Kwa Shamal told the Morning Star News that government officials made it clear they were to not ask questions about why they were destroying the church. The government also gave no compensation to the church for the destruction of their building.
The pastor said the church’s congregation will meet in a tent this Sunday.
The Islamists family members of persecuted Christian Meriam Ibrahim are attempting to get the death sentence against her reinstated by trying to prove she was “born a Muslim.”
The family contends that because she’s a Muslim, her marriage to a Christian man is illegal under Sudan’s Sharia Law.
The lawyer hired by the family says they are going to ask Khartoum Religious Court to review the case and declare Meriam Ibrahim “belongs” to the men in her family.
Ibrahim is in hiding at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum with her American husband and two children. She has been unable to leave the country because of the government’s special police charging her with using illegal documents to leave the country.
Ibrahim’s lawyer Mohanem Mostafa said that the court has not officially notified her of the lawsuit but that he believes the court will dismiss the case.
