Christian persecution - Page 7

Russian authorities opened a criminal case this week against five Jehovah’s Witnesses on suspicion of “organizing and participating in the activities of an extremist organization” for allegedly promoting their namesake religious group, which is officially outlawed as an “extremist ideology” in Russia.

Indian diplomats condemned the government of Pakistan on Tuesday for what they called the “institutionalized violation of human rights” in that country before the United Nations, where Pakistan sits on the Human Rights Council.

Pakistan police in Lahore have initiated a manhunt to find two young Christian men accused of blasphemy for allegedly making derogatory comments about Islam.

Catholic League President Bill Donohue denounced President Joe Biden’s tunnel vision on human rights in focusing exclusively on LGBT issues while ignoring persecuted Christians.

Police arrested nine Christians in central India based on complaints of forced conversions from a Hindu nationalist group, AsiaNews reported Friday.

A mob of some 30 Hindu nationalists stormed a Christian church service in southern India this week, beating the pastor and leaving 27 others injured, International Christian Concern (ICC) reported Thursday.

Indian Christians were victims of at least 327 instances of discrimination and targeted violence during 2020, the Barnabas Fund revealed this week.

Human rights activists have reported a negative trend in Pakistan’s violations of religious freedom, insisting that 2020 saw a marked increase in persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.

A Nigerian Catholic priest abducted last week was hacked to death with machetes by his kidnappers, according to a report Monday.

Mexico is back on the World Watch List in 2021, a yearly index of the 50 countries where it is most dangerous to be a Christian.

Two Christian-majority nations — Colombia and Mexico — appeared in the ranking of the top 50 most dangerous places to be a Christian in the world published by the Christian aid organization Open Doors this week.

The Chinese Communist Party is using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to crack down on Christians, even arresting some for attending online services via Zoom, David Curry, the CEO of the Christian charity Open Doors, told Breitbart News in an interview on Wednesday.

Nigeria has the gruesome honor of being the country with the most murders of Christians for their faith in 2020, Open Doors’ Watch List 2021 revealed Wednesday.

Christian persecution around the globe reached an unprecedented level in 2020, with over 340 million Christians facing “high levels of persecution,” Open Doors revealed Wednesday with the publication of World Watch List 2021.

Pakistani police have charged three young Christians with blasphemy after local Muslims purportedly found burned pages of the Quran, the Christian Post reported Saturday.

Police have arrested a man who allegedly smashed windows of a historic Catholic church in Leicester, England, while denouncing “parasitic Christians.”

The local government in south-central Konya, Turkey, announced this week that it would turn a fully renovated 19th-century Armenian church into a “humor art house” after barring worshippers from using the church for years, multiple reports revealed Thursday.

Open Doors, an international Christian aid organization, told Breitbart News in a recent interview that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic has allowed repressive forces to more ably target vulnerable Christians, from denying them health care to offering to trade their faith for food.

The Catholic Bishop of Gboko told members of the U.S. Congress that Nigeria’s Middle Belt has become the theater for the “mass slaughter of Christians.”

Gang members and militia fighters associated with a coalition linked to Iran have escalated attacks on liquor stories — most owned by Christians and Yazidis — in Baghdad, Iraq, the Kurdish outlet Rudaw reported Sunday.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday that Azeri forces appear to have deliberately bombed a Christian church in the Nagorno-Karabakh town of Shushi during recent fighting over the breakaway territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

A video allegedly showing an Azerbaijani soldier beheading an elderly Armenian man surfaced online in recent days, the Armenian news site panarmenian.net reported on Tuesday.

Two human rights watchdog groups have published an extensive report examining Christian persecution in Turkey and showing that Christians are still treated as second-class citizens in the mostly Muslim nation.

Radical Islamists have killed at least 30 Christians, raped 10 young women and girls, and kidnapped fifteen others in a spate of recent attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Christian Post reported Wednesday.

Last Friday’s arson attack on the Basilica of the Agony in Gethsemane was “a crime inspired by an extreme ideology that seeks to drive Christians from the Holy Land,” according to a senior Christian leader in Jerusalem.

Unidentified gunmen opened fire and wounded a priest and a seminarian driving to Mass on Sunday in the village of Akum in the Northwest region of Cameroon.

A presumed arsonist set fire to the Basilica of the Agony in Gethsemane Friday, a holy site where Jesus is believed to have spent the final night with his apostles before being crucified the next day.

A mob of Muslim villagers in Egypt attacked a church and assaulted Coptic Christians in retaliation for a Facebook post published by a young Coptic man, which Muslim locals considered insulting to the Prophet Muhammad.

A number of churches, public buildings, and monuments across four continents were lit up in scarlet Wednesday in protest of Christian persecution.

The number of Christians facing persecution around the world has risen to 260 million over the past year, said Hungary’s State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians in an online conference this week.

The ACLU is seeking to remove a nativity scene on the lawn of the Fulton County Courthouse that has been displayed since 1980.

A team of security agents raided Xuncheng Church in China’s Shanxi province on Sunday, interrupting the worship service and arresting the preacher as well as six members of the congregation, International Christian Concern (ICC) reported Tuesday.

Christians are harassed in more countries than members of any other faith, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

Rev. Franklin Graham honored the nation’s veterans and also observed that America “is under attack – attack from within.”

Several gunmen opened fire on Christians inside a Pentecostal church in Punjab, killing one and injuring three more, UCA News reported Monday.

A Catholic charity has launched a campaign urging Prime Minister Boris Johnson to grant UK asylum to a young Christian girl in Pakistan receiving death threats from a Muslim rapist who forced her to marry him and convert to Islam.