The Plight of Middle East Christians

The Patriot Post Digest · October 14, 2011 Warfront With Jihadistan: The Plight of Middle East Christians Ten years after the United States freed the Afghan people from the Islamist Taliban regime, and months after the "Arab Spring" supposedly brought more freedom to many Arab states, the reality on the ground, especially for religious freedom, continues to deteriorate. According to the U.S. State Department's latest International Religious Freedom Report, for example, there is not a single public Christian church left in Afghanistan despite the deaths of more than 1,700 U.S. troops and $440 billion spent to win freedom for the Afghan people. The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according to the report, which also notes that "there were no Christian schools in the country." Meanwhile in Egypt, ground zero for the Arab Spring, the allegedly secular military government has actively joined the country's majority Muslim population in brutally persecuting Egypt's Coptic Christians. This week alone, Egypt's armed forces killed more than 25 people and wounded hundreds when they brutally dispersed Coptic Christians gathered in front of the state broadcasting building to protest a church burning in Aswan. It is now feared that anti-Christian mobs will take the military's active repression as license to further terrorize the Copts. Finally, religious freedom fares no better in Iran, where that nation's Supreme Court has ordered a retrial for the high-profile case of Yousef Nadarkhani, the 32-year-old pastor who was sentenced to death for converting to Christianity. Iranian authorities later changed their story to say that Nadarkhani had committed rape and other crimes. Sadly, for all the talk of freedom in the Muslim world, there is still little evidence it exists. The Patriot Post www.patriotpost.us/subscribe