, the National Review Online
You are calling me from paradise to hell.”
Paul Bhatti recalls talking with his brother, Shahbaz, who would later be murdered for his insistence on speaking out against blasphemy laws in Pakistan.
Paul was living as a doctor in Italy. But his brother insisted: “The way to paradise lies in Pakistan.”
Shahbaz’s point — and the witness of his life – was this, as Paul describes it: “Non-involvement is not an option; we are obligated, being one human family, to struggle for those who are too weak to speak and defend themselves.”
Paul Bhatti writes about what has kept him working for religious freedom in Pakistan since his brother’s death in 2011 in a new report for Aid to the Church in Need on religious persecution throughout the world. Long story short: It’s on the upswing, and the rising “religious illiteracy” among Westerners isn’t helping matters.
At a recent conference on the plight of Christians in the Middle East and the surrounding region sponsored by the Napa Institute, Siobhan Nash-Marshall, a philosophy professor at Manhattanville College in New York, made the obvious observation that it’s hard for an American college student to understand the plight of a contemporary a world away. And so, a few years ago, she and a group of other women who felt the need to do something about persecuted Christians founded the Christians in Need Foundation. Among other things, it sponsors students from “ancient Christian communities” to study in American universities.
While we can’t — and shouldn’t: Their lands need them! — bring every persecuted Christian over here, we can start looking at their faces, listening to their stories, and drawing one another out of our indifference.
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Bishop of Mosul is Weeping…
His Eminence, Mor Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf, the Archbishop of Mosul, is weeping while explaining the misery of the Iraqi Christians, who had to leave their homes in Mosul and the surrounding villages over 3 months ago. Today, they are suffering the cold winter under the poor tents in Erbil (Kurdistan). Those Christians are still speaking Syriac (Aramaic) until today. I have translated this video, roughly from Syriac to English, in order to transmit this message to many people as much as possible.