Bishop Mouneer Anis on the Crisis Facing Egyptian Christians

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Anglican, Anglican Church, Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Christian persecution, Coptic Christians, Coptic Church, Diocese of Egypt, Egypt, Egyptian Christians, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Islam, Islamism, Islamists, Jeff Walton, Mohammed Morsi, Mouneer Anis, Pope Tawadros II, Salafists

Anglican Bishop of Egypt Mouneer Anis (R) greets Coptic Pope Tawadros II (Photo credit: Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria).

By Jeff Walton (@JeffreyHWalton)

UPDATE: Bishop Anis has released a letter about upcoming June 30 demonstrations in Egypt that can be viewed by clicking here.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is this week embarking on his first visit abroad since his enthronement earlier this year. Lambeth Palace says the Anglican official chose the Holy Land because of the region’s importance to global stability.

Welby is “deeply concerned for justice and for the security of all the peoples of the region, and the pressures on its Christian communities,” according to a statement from Lambeth Palace.  “In particular he wants to support and honour the work of the President-Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, the Most Revd Mouneer Anis in Cairo; and the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, the Right Revd Suheil Dawani, with whom he will be staying in Jerusalem and who will accompany him on all his visits.”

This spring I met Bishop Anis in North Carolina at the New Wineskins for Global Mission Conference. Bishop Anis spoke on the difficult situation his fellow Egyptian Christians face, especially in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” uprising that toppled former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“It was like the honeymoon,” Anis described of Egyptian Christians and Muslims joining together to protest corruption, low quality of life, high food prices and unemployment. Women and Christians began to participate in political life, and one man openly proclaimed “I am a convert from Islam, I am a Christian, that is my right.”

Unfortunately, harmony did not endure as Islamist groups asserted themselves. Anis outlined four Islamic groups in Egypt, each a smaller concentric circle within another:

Anis described the majority of Egypt’s Muslim population as “ordinary, normal people without an agenda except to live peacefully.”

Within the Muslim population is a smaller group of Islamists who primarily seek political power. A third, smaller subset of Islamists (Salafis) are more militant than the broader Islamist group, reject the use of modern things and want to return to the ways of the “fathers.”

Finally, a small circle within the Salafis are the Jihadists: militant Muslims who count terrorists among their numbers and “have an agenda to create an Islamic nation – the Caliphate.”

Anis determined that the second group – the Islamists – posed the greatest danger to Christians. While not as extreme as Salafis or Jihadists subsets, the Islamists have a much wider base of support within the population. Usually, Islamists lack the anti-modernist teachings that make the “vocal and self-defeating” Salafis “out of tune” with Egyptian voters, such as opposition to women in the workplace.

Following elections, the Egyptian parliament is now dominated by Salafis and other Islamists that hold about 70 percent of seats, according to Anis. The Egyptian bishop assessed that “people who are not educated are easily moved,” something Egypt’s high rate of illiteracy exacerbates.

“There was disappointment in the hearts of the young people who sought revolution,” Anis reported, cited churches burned and people killed. “All of them are Christians.”

Anis attributed the election of Muslim Brotherhood official Mohammed Morsi, and his predominantly Islamist government, upon “people [who] didn’t want anything from the previous regime.”

The bishop, however, was quick to assert that Morsi was accountable to a broader power structure and was individually not as powerful as might be perceived.

“It became obvious that the Muslim brotherhood leadership had the power,” rather than Morsi himself, Anis reported. The Anglican bishop and other Christian leaders met with Morsi to share their concerns, “He listened to us, but nothing happened.”

The dour situation has not been without silver linings, however: increased difficulty for Christians has also led to increased unity.

“One of the greatest joys [has been] to start the Egypt Council of Churches,” Anis exclaimed. The Anglican leader had high praise for new Pope Tawadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church, a man who is “very keen for Christian unity.” Welby will meet with Tawadros this week during his visit.

Describing the former pharmacist as a man with “a very big heart,” Anis, himself a medical doctor, praised Tawadros as “a gift from heaven” and assessed that historic differences between Christians of Eastern and Western traditions was dissolving.

Among the issues facing the Coptic church is an exodus of young adults departing for other countries. Alarmed at the departure of 100,000 Christians in 2011 alone, Anis lamented that among them are “the best minds” in the Christian community.

“It is amazing that the Middle East could be a place without a Christian witness,” Anis worried, connecting the link between presence and witness.

“Because we live in a [majority] Islamic country, the only thing we can do to show God’s love is serve society,” Anis added, highlighting English instruction, arts camps and other ministries to both Christian and Muslim Egyptians.

In closing, Anis asked American Christians to pray for:

-An end to the emigration of young people from Egypt’s Christian community
-Good Samaritans in Egyptian society
-All churches in the Middle East

Free the China 16!

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Chen Guangcheng, china, China Aid, Christian persecution, democracy, Faith J. H. McDonnell, Falun Gong, Free China 16, Human Rights, Tibet, underground churches, Uyghurs

Christians pray in one of China’s underground churches
(Photo credit: Alpha Relief)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

Very often church members and other concerned citizens ask me what they can to help the persecuted church around the world. They also express their frustration at being overwhelmed by the scope of the problem – all of the countries and all of the people who are affected. They wonder if anything they do can make a difference. You may have wondered this yourself, so I want to share with you one example of a campaign in which you can make a difference right now.

This month, June 2013, the 24^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, a coalition of 30 human rights and religious freedom organizations, including The Institute on Religion and Democracy, launched the “Free China 16” campaign. The China 16 represent thousands and thousands of citizens, oppressed, persecuted, and/or imprisoned by the Chinese Communist government.

These brave men and women, prisoners of conscience and faith, include Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Uyghurs, human rights attorneys, democracy activists, and Christians. Another of the China 16 is the nephew of Chen Guangcheng, the blind human rights activist and defense lawyer who escaped from house arrest in 2012.  In fact, Mr. Chen and Christian human rights group China Aid played an important role in bringing our coalition together on their behalf, to urge the United States government and other world leaders to pressure President Xi Jinping for their release.

Our international coalition for Free China 16 released a letter and a list of the China 16 to President Barack Obama on June 5, just prior to President Obama’s meeting with President Xi. In the letter we informed Obama that the list included individuals “who have been imprisoned for as long as ten years.” Many of these “now suffer from serious health problems,” we told him, and they are “denied access to adequate treatment or even visitation from family members.”

We explained that our “initiative on behalf of the China 16 is intended to match brave and suffering faces to the abuses now taking place in China against lawyers, academics, writers, businessmen, and religious and political leaders, who carry with them the hope for a more peaceful 21^st century for all.” We said that each of the China 16 “merits a strong voice,” not just from civil society and the media, but from the United States government.

Our letter reminded Obama of the human rights advocacy and intervention that occurred during the Cold War, because the U.S. “has long and successfully made a robust commitment to the human rights of prisoners of conscience a critical component of our foreign policy.” We added that this priority “enhanced rather than detracted from the satisfactory resolution of the full range of U.S.-Soviet bilateral relations.”

Now, here’s what you can do to help:

1. Read the biographies of the China 16. If you can’t open the link to the Google document, we will have the document available on the IRD website next week, in the Become Aware and Take Action section.
2. Pray for the China 16, encourage your family, friends, and fellow church members to pray for them.
3. Four members of Congress, U.S. Representatives Frank Wolf and James McGovern, the co-chairs of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and U.S. Representatives Chris Smith and Karen Bass, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations also sent a bi-partisan letter about the China 16 to President Obama. You can alert your own members of Congress to this great action and ask that they also raise their voices on behalf of the China 16.
4. Watch Juicy Ecumenism and the IRD website for more ideas in the coming days.

Inspired by a Russian Christian Dissident

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advocacy, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Christian persecution, Communism, dissident, Evin Prison, Faith J. H. McDonnell, freedom, Gulag, intercession, Iranian Christians, Islamism, Pastor Saeed Abedini, prayer, Russia, Soviet Union, Tehran, totalitarianism, tyranny

Sasha Ogorodnikov and me in Moscow 1991. (Photo credit: Faith McDonnell)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

This week Front Page Magazine published my story about Russian Christian dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov. The news about a new biography of this courageous man, Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia, by Koenraad De Wolf was what spurred me to reflecting on my own experiences with this hero of Soviet Union era Christianity.

I was very pleased that De Wolf has chronicled Ogorodnikov’s amazing story, and I hope that it will be read far and wide. It is a challenge to complacent, apathetic church members. It is an education into what “socialism” is really all about to Millennials and others may have had their views shaped by America’s own socialism supporters in public education and in the seminaries. And it is an encouragement that tyrannies and totalitarianisms – whether Marxist or Islamist – are not the final answer. Only God is the final answer, and He is able to deliver the oppressed.

You can read about my own experience with Sasha (Ogorodnikov’s nickname) in the Front Page article. It began before I ever met him, praying for him while he was in the Gulag. And then, the miracle! God answers prayer for his release and his pardon is signed by Mikhail Gorbachev himself. And to top it off – a few years later I was privileged to go with a small team from Church of the Apostles on a short-term mission to help Sasha form plans for a soup kitchen and many other ministries.

In Front Page Magazine I explained that reading Sasha’s story once again in Dissident for Life made me realize the significance of the experience of knowing and praying for and knowing a former prisoner of faith as I had never realized while it was happening. This made me wonder what experiences, what relationships in today’s ongoing battles for freedom around the world may ultimately be those that will make a similar difference.

For instance, right now we are praying for Pastor Saeed Abedini, imprisoned in Tehran’s horrible Evin Prison for his faith – along with dozens of other Christians as well as innocent Baha’i members. If God can open the prison gates and deliver Alexander Ogorodnikov from his Communist captors and then go on to use him to bring blessing to so many in Russia and throughout the world, He can do the same thing for Pastor Saeed and all those who are in prison and labor camp for the sake of the Gospel. Please pray with me for this miracle.

Sympathy for the Devil: Equivocation on Boko Haram

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Boko Haram, Borno State, Christian persecution, Faith J. H. McDonnell, FTO designation, Jihad, Johnnie Carson, Jubilee Campaign, Justice for Jos, moral equivalence, Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, Sharia, U.S. State Dept., USCIRF

Victims of Boko Haram Violence in Maiduguri, northern Nigeria
(Photo credit: PMNews Nigeria)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

The “Islamist apologist choir” described in Cinnamon Stillwell’s recent story “Profs on Boston Bombing” doesn’t sing solely on behalf of Chechnya and Cambridge. Some of that choir’s most dreadful caterwauling today is in support of Nigeria’s yet-undesignated terrorists, Boko Haram. The choir stalls are located in the U.S. State Department, which not only refuses to designate the jihadists as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), but maligns and defames Boko Haram’s Christian victims, as well.

Boko Haram’s latest attack, killing at least 42, took place on Tuesday, May 7, in the already battle-worn town of Bama, in Nigeria’s northeast Borno State. Borno, one of 12 states under Sharia, has suffered heavy losses under the Islamists. Some believe that Boko Haram has taken over northern Borno State much as Islamists took over northern Mali. At least 277 had been killed by Boko Haram in Borno State in 2013 before this attack.  According to an AP story the Tuesday event involved “coordinated attacks by Islamic extremists armed with heavy machine guns” in multiple locations around Bama. The jihadists also raided a federal prison, freeing 105 inmates.

Military spokesman Lt. Colonel Sagir Musa told AP that “some 200 fighters in buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns attacked the barracks of the 202 Battalion of Nigeria’s beleaguered army.” Musa, who said two soldiers and 10 insurgents died in the attack, revealed that the attackers “came in army uniform pretending to be soldiers.” The Islamists killed 14 prison guards. They also attacked and razed a police station, a police barracks, a magistrate’s court, and local government offices, according to Lt. Col. Musa. Bama police commander Sagir Abubakar reported that at least 22 police officers, three children and a woman were killed in the attacks.

Boko Haram frequently attacks Nigeria’s police and military forces. In 2012 as documented by the Facts on Nigeria Violence website, there were at least 67 attacks, almost exclusively by Boko Haram, against military barracks, police stations, prisons, and other government facilities, as well as against individual soldiers, policemen, and civil servants. But Boko Haram’s main targets are northern Nigeria’s Christians and churches.

The official name of Boko Haram, Jamā’a Ahl al-sunnah li-da’wa wa al-jihād, can be translated “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” Its goal is to establish a pure Islamic state in northern Nigeria, removing the Christian presence – either by conversion, expulsion, or extermination. Boko Haram appears to prefer the third option. According to the World Watch Monitor (WWM) report on global Christian persecution, Nigeria had a higher death toll from anti-Christian persecution and violence than the rest of the world combined. WWM concluded that Nigeria is “the most violent place on earth for Christians.”

In a recent Front Page Magazine article, Daniel Greenfield exposed the unfortunate moral equivalence found in the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) 2013 report on Nigeria. While much of the report is very good and condemns Boko Haram, impunity, and the forced imposition of Sharia, USCIRF appears to have developed the same pathological impulse that afflicts the rest of the federal government, to never blame Islam. As a result, portions of the report mischaracterize certain acts of violence by both Boko Haram and other Islamists targeting Christians, and criticize northern Nigerian Christian leaders for calling the situation what it is: persecution.

USCIRF’s egregious observations and recommendations are actually State Department policy. For instance, USCIRF parrots former Asst. Sec. of State for Africa, Johnnie Carson, who declared in a Congressional hearing, “It is important to note that religion is not the primary driver behind extremist violence in Nigeria” and that “the Nigerian government must effectively engage communities vulnerable to extremist violence by addressing the underlying political and socio-economic problems in the North.” USCIRF reports that “The U.S. government consistently has urged the Nigerian government to expand its strategy against Boko Haram from solely a military solution to addressing problems of economic and political marginalization in the north,” says USCIRF, “arguing that Boko Haram’s motivations are not religious but socio-economic.”

Responding to Carson’s testimony at a House Subcommittee on Africa hearing in July 2012, Subcommittee Chairman, U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), remonstrated that poverty alone does not drive people to violence. And in any case, Boko Haram is well funded by outside Islamists. “Heavy machine guns” and “buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns” are just the latest examples to show that Boko Haram is not just a motley crew of impoverished, marginalized local Muslims. In February 2013 it was revealed that hundreds of Boko Haram members had trained for months in terrorist camps in northern Mali with the local “Ansar Dine” al Qaeda of Mali. Their former chef, explained that he cooked for over 200 Nigerians who had “arrived in Timbuktu in April 2012 in about 300 cars, after al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) swept into the city.”

In its 2013 Nigeria briefing, human rights group Justice for Jos +, a project of Jubilee Campaign USA, remarked, “Ironically, in northern Nigeria, it is Christians who are totally disenfranchised politically, economically, and socially in their own states and by their own ethnic groups due to their religious identity.” This is worse than just “political marginalization,” Mr. Carson! Justice for Jos + continues, “Christians are regarded as inferior to Muslims and suffer ongoing, systematic and comprehensive discrimination even by local and (Sharia) state governments.”

As in many Islam-dominated regions, the northern Nigerian Sharia state governments require permits to construct new churches or repair old ones. But churches are disappearing from the northern Nigerian landscape because the permits are not granted and the existing churches are being demolished or burned in anti-Christian riots and Boko Haram attacks. “The Muslim community is so determined to prevent Christians from having churches to meet in, that when selling land to Christians they commonly include the proviso ‘Not to be used for a bar, a brothel, or a church’ on official deeds,” Justice for Jos + reveals.

Thanks to pressure from the U.S. State Department, Nigeria’s Christian President appears more concerned with demonstrating that he is not biased in favor of his fellow Christians than seeing justice done for those who have suffered (even to the point of considering offering amnesty to Boko Haram). The State Department has pressured President Jonathan to give more federal resources and create a special ministry for “northern affairs.” Justice for Jos+ reports that at the same that federal resources have provided the northern states with “millions in public funds on forced mass weddings for widows, pilgrimages to Mecca, rams for sacrifice at Islamic celebrations, and payments to terrorists’ families,” there has been no compensation to the families of Christian victims.

In their many publicly released statements and videos, Boko Haram has never declared poverty and marginalization to be a motive for their actions. On the contrary, they state clearly that their actions are a “jihad (Holy War).” They said that “Christians in Nigeria should accept Islam, that is true religion, or they will never have peace,” and that they “do not have any agenda” other than working to establish an Islamic Kingdom like during the time of Prophet Mohammed.”

Could this be the reason why, in the disapproving words of the USCIRF report, “a number of prominent Nigerian Christian leaders . . . believe that Boko Haram has a significant sectarian dimension, and in particular, seeks to eradicate Christian communities in central and northern Nigeria”? USCIRF, again echoing the State Department policy worries, “This chasm in perspective is a serious concern. If Nigeria’s most prominent Christian leaders view the ongoing violence as sectarian, the faithful communities who follow their lead may also embrace this view, adversely affecting tolerance and respect across religions.” This is offensive not just in casting the Christian community as the villain of the piece, but in its lack of acknowledgement of the unbelievable restraint that Christians have shown in the face of the slaughter of their family, friends, and co-religionists.

In April 2012, former Asst. Secretary Carson told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the US would soon open a consulate in Kano, one of the full-Sharia northern states, to join the U.S. Embassy in Abuja and the existing consulate in Lagos. Three months earlier, Boko Haram had carried out numerous simultaneous attacks on the security agencies in Kano – police stations, army barracks, intelligence headquarters – leaving some 200 dead. What a great place to build a new U.S. consulate. Kano is about 200 miles from Abuja. About half as far as Benghazi is from Tripoli.

This blog post originally appeared on Front Page Magazine as an article and is reposted with permission.

USA, Wake Up: The Cry of American Copts in the Aftermath of Arab “Spring”

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Boko Haram, Christian persecution, Coptic Christians, Copts, Faith J. H. McDonnell, Iran, Iranian Freedom, Jihad, Marginalized people of Sudan, Mohamed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Northern Nigerian Christians, protest, Religious Minorities, Syrian Christians, terrorism, The White House, U.S. Capitol, U.S. support of Muslim Brotherhood

Coptic Christians and other Egyptian Americans, joined by supporters, march from the White House to the U.S. Capitol.
(Photo credit: Faith J. H. McDonnell)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

“US, wake up!” was one of the most frequent shouts heard in Washington, DC on April 18, 2013, as hundreds of Coptic Christians, other Egyptian Americans, and their supporters joined together to protest the most recent atrocities against Christians and others since Egypt fell into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and urge action by the U.S. government and the world community.

Photo credits: Faith McDonnell

Signs demanding justice for victims of Islamist violence in Egypt and signs heartbreakingly depicting some of those victims shared space in the protest rally at Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

The rally in front of the White House was extended until busloads of participants from all over the United States arrived, and then the march began down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol. Members of other people groups that have been marginalized and persecuted under Islamist supremacism joined the Copts to show solidarity.

The groups included a delegation of Christians from northern Nigeria, under constant attack by the Boko Haram terrorists who want to cleanse Nigeria of all Christians.

Syrians show solidarity (Photo credit: Faith McDonnell)

Christians from besieged northern Nigeria show their support.

Also present were Syrian Christians — first oppressed under the tyrannical Assad regime and now facing the possibility of an Islamist takeover in Syria.

Marginalized and oppressed Sudanese from the north, from Beja land in the east, and from South Sudan participated.

And also joining was an Iranian dissident who has suffered under the Islamic regime in his country. A representative of each of these communities spoke at the rally.

En route to Capitol Hill, the protestors continued to raise their voices. They asked why the U.S. would continue to fund and supply with arms a terrorist regime. They declared that “Coptic blood is not cheap.” They demanded the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi. They plead for help to bring real freedom and democracy — not the type that came with the clueless support of Arab “Spring” — to all of the people of Egypt. One source of help would be the passage of a bill in Congress right now to create a special envoy for religious minorities in the Middle East and South Central Asia.

Whether in Egypt, Nigeria, Sudan, Iran, Syria, or any other place in the world — supremacists see all others as either second-class citizens to be marginalized and oppressed, or as threats to a pristine and pure Islamist state that need to be eliminated. These perpetrators of prejudice, violence, and evil must be faced by a united front of those who want all people to live in freedom. And such a united front is needed in order to arouse the United States and the global community. The Copts’ rally was a good starting point.