Church Closed in Egypt after Muslim Mob Frightens Children in Sunday school

CAIRO, Egypt, April 23, 2019 (Morning Star News) – A Coptic church in Upper Egypt is closed after a throng of angry Muslims attacked it this month, beating a priest and another Copt as more than 200 fearful children who had gathered for Bible lessons looked on, according to advocacy groups.

One of the injured Copts, Asaad Bakheet Rezek, told Coptic TV (CTV) that a Muslim about 17 years old beat one of the priests with a club as security forces led him from the Anba Karas Church building in Naga al-Ghafir, Sohag Governorate in southern Egypt.

The priest, identified as Father Basilious, sustained a minor head injury as security forces escorted him and another priest into an armored vehicle after the chanting mob tried to enter the building, Rezek said, adding that the children were terrified by the club- and knife-wielding crowds as they shouted, cursed and pelted the building with rocks.

The village mayor had gone to the church premises the previous day, angry at construction underway for a fourth floor to a building annex, according to advocacy groups Coptic Solidarity and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).

The mayor accused the Christians of “treason” for the add-on. He started shouting to neighbors to take action against the church and left, later submitting a notice at the city council complaining about the construction, according to the groups. The city council immediately arrived, stopped the work and confiscated building materials, including the cement and the reinforced steel.

The next day at 4 p.m., dozens of angry demonstrators tried to enter the church premises but were unable to get through a steel door. Carrying clubs and knives, they started shouting, cursing and pelting the building with rocks, according to Coptic Solidarity.

Additional forces arrived, and Father Basilious was struck as he and another priest were escorted off the premises. Parents and church leaders were not able to move the 200 children away from the angry, chanting villagers until security forces dispersed the crowds. Though police witnessed the beating of the priest, no arrests were made.

Both Father Basilious and Father Bakhoum were taken for questioning into the evening hours.

Police issued an indefinite closure order, pending investigations, and froze all activities of the 10-year-old church, including the its daycare and the Sunday School.

The church, which held worship services every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, was the only one serving a Christian population of about 1,300 in Naga al-Ghafir village, the rights groups said. There had been no prior trouble with Muslim neighbors.

“The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights condemns the closure of the Anba Karas Church in Naga al-Ghafir,” an EIPR statement read. “The church was shuttered after dozens of Muslim residents of the village surrounded the church and chanted hostile slogans against Copts; a Christian cleric and another citizen were injured after being assaulted with sticks.”

The EIPR stated that the right of worship, individually or collectively, whether in a church building, home, or other building, is a fundamental right upheld by the Egyptian constitution and international human rights conventions ratified by Egypt.

“This right is not contingent on the will of the majority,” the EIPR noted.

The church was issued a permit four years ago as an association for religious activities, prayers and social services. Two years ago the church bought an adjacent 75-square meter plot and annexed a structure to the older building after submitting all payments and paperwork to authorities.

The second and third floors were built two months ago, and there were no problems until the construction of the fourth floor began.

“The EIPR condemns the practice of security agencies closing down churches in which worship services are regularly held, on the grounds that they are not officially licensed,” the EIPR statement reads. “This violates Article 8 of Law 80/2016 on the construction of churches, which provides for the continued functioning of churches and religious buildings even in the absence of the necessary permits or failure to meet the conditions for legal status. It also contradicts a letter sent by the head of the construction and public relations sector in the Ministry of Housing on Jan. 6, 2018 to Father Mikhail Anton, the representative of the Orthodox Coptic confession on the church regularization committee.”

The housing ministry official stated that 14 governorates had been instructed not to suspend any worship services in churches that had filed their applications for status with the governorate regularization committees, according to the EIPR statement.

The EIPR has documented 32 incidents of sectarian tension and violence since the church construction law went into effect, all of them associated with worship. Interventions by various state institutions in this period led to the closure of 22 churches and the prohibition of collective worship within them, it stated.

Egypt ranked 16^th on Christian support organization Open Doors’ 2019 World Watch List of countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.

China Training Pastors to Preach on Communism, not the Bible

Officials in China’s third largest province are training pastors to include communist ideology in their weekly sermons, according to a new report from a religious liberty watchdog.

The same officials also are forcing pastors to affirm traditional Chinese beliefs – such as ancestral worship – that conflict with Scripture. 

At issue is the approval of pastors within the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the government-approved Protestant body that faces severe restrictions.

Pastors who failed a test on communist beliefs weren’t approved. 

Last year the Bureau of Ethnic and Religious Affairs in Henan province – the third-largest province with 94 million people – began applying Communist Party membership standards to screen Three-Self preachers, according to Bitter Winter, an organization that monitors religious liberty. 

The assessment included two parts: a sample sermon and a questionnaire. 

The Bureau told the pastors to write a sample sermon that must include “national policy, traditional culture and the core socialist values” in the text, Bitter Winter reported. Christian doctrines such as eternal life, heaven and hell were prohibited from being included. 

“The preachers are worried that churches in China will eventually become the CCP’s political propaganda agencies,” Bitter Winter’s Jiang Tao wrote.

One pastor was told to prepare a sermon on the subject, “Christians must love their country.”

To gauge a pastor’s political standing, the questionnaire included questions about Chinese and communist beliefs. A pastor only passed if the answers corresponded with the beliefs of the government.  

The question, “How do you regard tomb-sweeping and offering sacrifices to ancestors?” would need to include the answer, “This is part of China’s traditional culture; Christians can sweep tombs and offer sacrifices to their ancestors; it is not against the Bible.”

The question, “Why are minors not allowed to go to church?” should be followed by the answer, “This is a national policy; not letting children enter churches is to ensure their physical and mental health.”

In one major city, Xinzheng (population 600,000), only 58 out of 100 pastors passed. In Luolong district, nearly 50 out of 80 pastors failed the assessment.  

“[T]e test for a preaching certificate is used to examine participants on their political thinking. Government officials don’t understand the Bible,” one pastor told Bitter Winter. “As long as you flatter the Communist Party and support it, you can pass the assessment. Otherwise, no matter how well you can talk about the Bible, it would still be useless.”

Said another pastor, who is in his 80s, “The government’s goal of training young preachers is to indoctrinate and infiltrate them, so that they use the CCP’s methods when giving sermons at gatherings, and, in the end, they will become more than willing to serve the CCP.”

Dangerous Rise of Anti-Semitism All Over The World, Including The Church

There is no place for anti-Semitism in our society, and all of us should be deeply alarmed by how rapidly anti-Semitism is rising across North America, Europe and the Middle East. The numbers that I am going to share with you in this article are incredibly disturbing, and many believe that anti-Semitism is now the worst that it has been since the end of World War II. After what we witnessed during the 1930s and 1940s, you would think that the world would never want to go down that path ever again, and yet it is happening.  Millions upon millions of people deeply hate the Jewish people just because they are Jewish, and it is getting worse with each passing day. The lastest example is the New York Times which just days after the Times published an op-ed falsely claiming Jesus was a Palestinian, placed a cartoon on their op-ed page, depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind U.S. President Donald Trump.

Imagine if the New York Times cartoon that depicted Israel's Prime Minister as a dog had, instead, depicted the leader of another ethnic or gender group in a similar manner? If you think that is hard to imagine that you are absolutely right. It would be inconceivable for a Times editor to have allowed the portrayal of a Muslim leader as a dog; or the leader of any other ethnic or gender group in so dehumanizing a manner.

What is it then about Jews that allowed such a degrading cartoon about one of its leaders? One would think that in light of the history of the Holocaust, which is being commemorated this week, the last group that a main stream newspaper would demonize by employing a caricature right out of the Nazi playbook, would be the Jews. But, no. Only three quarters of a century after Der Stürmer incentivized the mass murder of Jews by dehumanizing them we see a revival of such bigoted caricatures.

Threats of rising anti-semitism caught the world's attention after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, where the gunman murdered 12 people and injured 7 during Shabbat morning service.  Now another one has happened...

19-year-old John Earnest was once a quiet piano player that had a seemingly bright future in front of him, but after being infected by the vile anti-Semitism that is rapidly spreading all over the Internet, he decided that it would be a good idea to walk into a synagogue and start shooting people...

One woman was killed and three others were wounded when a man entered a synagogue during Passover services Saturday at the Chabad of Poway temple and opened fire with an AR-style assault weapon shortly before 11:30 a.m.

Poway is about 25 miles northeast of San Diego. The city's mayor, President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom all called the attack a hate crime.

The suspect, 19-year-old John Earnest, was arrested and is being questioned by authorities.

60-year-old Lori Gilbert Kaye was killed when she stepped in front of the synagogue's rabbi as he rushed to evacuate children.  She will be remembered as a hero, while John Earnest will be remembered as a hate-filled racist that said that Jewish people "deserve nothing but hell". All over the globe, prominent political leaders are condemning what John Earnest did.  In his statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it "an attack on the heart of the Jewish people"...

"I condemn the abhorrent attack on a synagogue in California; this is an attack on the heart of the Jewish people," Netanyahu said in a statement. "We send condolences to the family of Lori Gilbert-Kaye and our best wishes for a quick recovery to the wounded. The international community must step up the struggle against anti-Semitism."

Unfortunately, we aren't talking about just a few isolated individuals.

A recent CNN survey that was conducted in Europe discovered that anti-Semitic attitudes are very widespread over there...

Anti-Semitic stereotypes are alive and well in Europe, while the memory of the Holocaust is starting to fade, a sweeping new survey by CNN reveals. More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars across the world.

One in five said they have too much influence in the media and the same number believe they have too much influence in politics.

Other polls have showed the majority of British adults don't know that 6 million Jewish people were murdered in Holocaust, or they believe the number killed to be much less than this.

The European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency study published last year asked European Jews in 12 countries their views on anti-Semitism. Hundreds of Jews polled said they had experienced a physical, anti-Semitic attack in the past year. According to authorities in France, the number of anti-Semitic attacks in that country rose 74 percent last year.

Of course this is not just a recent trend either.  According to the Anti-Defamation League, there was a huge increase in global anti-Semitic attacks from 2016 to 2017...

The Anti-Defamation League has identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in its 2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. That's up from 1,267 in 2016, marking the highest single-year increase since the organization released its first audit in 1979.

Those are deeply chilling numbers. If you are not Jewish, you may not think about anti-Semitism much.  But for those that must deal with it on a daily basis, it is a nightmare that never ends.

According to another survey of Jewish people living in Europe, 90 percent indicated that they believe that anti-Semitism is growing in the country in which they currently live.  The following comes from the Guardian... The report found 90% of respondents felt antisemitism was growing in their country and 30% had been harassed. Over a third avoided going to Jewish events or sites because of safety fears, while the same proportion had considered emigrating. Nearly 80% no longer reported minor incidents because they thought "nothing would change".

Even in polite mannered Canada the number of antisemitic incidents in Canada spiked in 2018, according to a new study published on Monday. The 2018 Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents commissioned by the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada showed 2,041 incidents of antisemitism took place last year, a 16.5 percent increase from 2017. The study also showed a 28.4-percent jump in antisemitic harassment, a 61.5-percent increase since 2015.

Here in the United States, anti-Semitism is rising rapidly as well.  In fact, there are an increasing number of "Christian churches" and "Christian ministries" that claim to be Christian but that also boldly express hatred for Israel and for the Jewish people at the same time.  

Much of this hatred finds it's roots in replacement theology which essentially teaches that the church has replaced Israel in God's plan. Adherents of replacement theology believe the Jews are no longer God's chosen people, and God does not have specific future plans for the nation of Israel. 

If you are anti-Semitic, you are literally embracing evil itself. And you can see it in their eyes.  You can literally see the evil in the eyes of anti-Semitic terrorists in the Middle East, in the eyes of crazed skinheads in Europe, and in the eyes of deranged extremists in the United States.

I love the Jewish people, and I am proud to stand with Israel.  We are not going to put up with anti-Semitism, and we are going to fight it wherever it is found.