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Monday, July 7, 2014

The War We Are In » Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch

The War We Are In » Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch

The War We Are In

We are in a monumental struggle, with the free West, based on the Judeo-Christian worldview, locked in struggle with political Islam, which is intent on taking over the West. Both systems cannot co-exist. One must ultimately prevail. It is a fight to the finish.
While so much of Islam’s takeover of the world has been achieved by military conquest over the centuries, today in the West it is done primarily by means of stealth jihad and creeping sharia. The examples of this are legion, as are the by now familiar stories of persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.
Taken together this is a full-frontal assault on Christianity world-wide. Both in Muslim-majority nations and in the once Christian West the onslaught of militant Islam continues unabated. Let’s begin with yet more depressingly familiar figures: when it comes to persecution of Christians, Muslims lead the way.
As one report states, nine of the worst ten nations for Christians are Islamic. And deaths are on the rise: “The number of Christian martyrs was twice as high in 2013 as the year before, and radical Islamist governments and groups are responsible for the vast majority of deaths and persecution around the world, according to the 2014 World Watch List.
“Open Doors USA, which assists the persecuted church around the world, compiled the World Watch list and reports 2,123 Christians were killed for their faith last year, compared to 1,201 in 2012. In fact, the killings in Syria alone (1,213) trumped the total from a year earlier.”
Emily Fuentes of Open Doors said, “The No. 1 thing that persecuted Christians ask for in every country is our prayers. It’s not Bibles. It’s not money. It’s prayers, and they know that prayer is the most powerful thing. It can change the hearts of leaders who may not be as drawn to sharing the message of persecuted Christians. It can even change the heart of dictators like Kim Jong-Un.”
Here are the top 15 nations when it comes to Christian persecution, with the overwhelming majority of them being Islamic:
1) North Korea
2) Somalia
3) Syria
4) Iraq
5) Afghanistan
6) Saudi Arabia
7) Maldives
8) Pakistan
9) Iran
10) Yemen
11) Sudan
12) Eritrea
13) Libya
14) Nigeria
15) Uzbekistan
That is the overt way of eliminating Christians while elevating Islam. Other ways are more subtle, including simple things like demographics. All over the West Islam is growing, just because of higher birth rates. As one indication of this, consider this bit of news out of the UK:
“Almost one in 10 babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim, according to new analysis of census figures published Friday, illustrating the growth of the minority community. Some 317,952 children aged under five, or 9.1 percent, were registered as being Muslim in the 2011 census, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show. As a measure of how the religious demographics of England and Wales are changing, the figure is nearly double the 4.8 percent of the whole population who are Muslim, while fewer than one in 200 people aged over 85 are Muslim.
“It is also an 80 percent increase on the 176,264 Muslim under-fives recorded in the 2001 census. ‘It certainly is a startling figure,’ David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, told The Times newspaper on Friday. ‘Continuing immigration from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India has been added to by new immigration from African countries and from the Middle East. Birth rates of Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin remain quite high, although falling. There seem to be very low levels of falling away from religion among Muslims’.”
That is one way to take over a nation. Another way is for Westerners who have converted to Islam to wage jihad against the “infidels”. And Australia is becoming fertile ground for all this: “The Syrian civil war is attracting Australian jihadists like no other conflict before it. Neither the Afghan jihad during the 1980s nor the Balkans conflict a decade later drew Australian Muslims in the numbers currently travelling to Syria.
“It is as if the two-year civil war against the regime of Bashir al-Assad is exerting a gravitational pull on Australian radicals, who are drawn to the fight in record numbers, energised by an interplay of ethnic and religious motivations. The reported deaths of Yusuf Ali and his 22-year-old wife Amira Ali took the number of Australians believed to have been killed in Syria to eight, although like most of the figures coming out of Syria you wouldn’t bet the farm on it. The Australian government has only limited knowledge of its citizens’ activities once they disappear behind Syria’s violent, lawless boundaries.
“But the deaths of Ali and his wife represented a grim milestone. Amira Ali was the first Australian woman killed in the war. (The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has yet to officially confirm both deaths.) A second such milestone was reached in September last year when a Brisbane man, ‘Ahmed’, drove a truck laden with explosives into a military checkpoint in northeastern Syria, becoming, in the process, Australia’s first known suicide bomber.”
Another article has also spoken to this recently, looking at Amira in more detail: “She was an elite Anglican private schoolgirl from the Gold Coast who became a ‘slave to Allah’. Born on the Glitter Strip to a Lebanese father who ran a kebab shop at Broadbeach, Amira Karroum became a radical after moving to Sydney two years ago and marrying Yousuf Ali, who died with her in Syria.
“While her early Facebook posts were filled with lighthearted comments, she used the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks to condemn the war on terror. ‘Worst effing night. I’m proud of being a Muslim! 10 years of war in Afghanistan for two towers,’ she wrote on September 11, 2011.”
Hmm, home-grown jihadists. Finally, as in so much of the West, we find ever more mosques being set up. Even more worrying is that many of these are former churches. Consider this sad case from Queensland: “A strange tale of friction between two Christian ministries in Toowoomba has emerged following the establishment of the city’s first mosque.
“In a nutshell, a Christian church was renting its building from another ministry for 14 years until it was sold to make way for a mosque. Former tenants Westside Christian Church have accused former landlord, Lifeworks Uniting Church, of selling the building from beneath their feet.
“Westside pastor Reverend John Solomon acknowledged that, in a legal sense, no wrong had been done – his church had been operating without a lease for the past four years. However, he was critical of the short timeframe allowed for his ministry to find a new home after 14 years’ tenancy.”
While I know nothing about these two churches, it is yet another example of Islam on the ascendancy while Christianity continues to struggle in the West. Any of these cases in isolation may not seem like much, but taken as a whole they mark some very worrying trends.
The war against the West and the war against Christianity continues with no signs of winding down. At the very least, we need to be aware of this worrying situation. I for one will continue to sound the alarm. Whether others take heed remains to be seen however.




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