Persecuted Christians plead for same rights as animals!
'Look upon us as frogs, we'll accept that'
By WND Staff Published February 1, 2020 at 1:49pm
Muslims are beheading Christians in the "killing field" of Nigeria, but the plights of endangered frogs in Australia, a pig forced to bungee jump in China and a gorilla at the Cincinnati zoo have drawn more attention in international media.
"The world prefers to worry about pandas rather than about us, threatened with extinction in the land where we were born," said Nicodemus Daoud Sharif, the Syrian Orthodox archbishop of Mosul.
Sharif and leaders of other churches facing persecution in Africa were given a voice by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti in a column for the Gatestone Institute.
Meotti, the cultural editor for the Italian daily Il Foglio, noted a recent wave of persecution that began with the beheading of 11 Nigerian Christians during the Christmas celebration.
The next day, a Catholic bride was beheaded with her bridesmaids in the Nigerian state of Borno. Then, in a raid on a village in the Nigerian state of Kaduna, terrorists shot anyone they met in the square where the evangelical community had gathered, killing two young Christian women. In addition, a Christian student was killed by Islamic jihadists who recorded his execution. Then pastor Lawan Andimi, a local leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria, was beheaded.
"Every day, our brothers and sisters are slaughtered in the streets," said Father Joseph Bature Fidelis of the Diocese of Maiduguri. " Please help us not be silent in the face of this immense extermination that is taking place in silence."
Meotti wrote that while Christians were murdered in Nigeria, the global media ran a story of a pig being tied up and shoved off a bungee tower at a new theme park in China.
"The Chinese pig got more media coverage than any of these murdered Christians in Nigeria," he wrote.
"Where has been the global outcry for the serial butchering of Christians just because they are Christians?
Sharif pointed out that a member of his Syriac church who emigrated to Australia was barred from building on land where a hole with eight frogs was discovered.
"And yet we are the last people who speak Jesus' language. We are Aramaic people and we don't have this right to have anyone protect us?" he said. "Look upon us as frogs, we'll accept that — just protect us so we can stay in our land."
Benedict Kiely, the founder of Nasarean.org, which helps the Christians of the Middle East, wrote that in "an era of round-the-clock information on our mobile phones, computers, televisions and social media, the abominations suffered by Christians have been left without images, while the brutality against the Chinese pig was streamed all over."
Nina Shea, an expert in religious freedom, said an "ongoing Islamic extremist project to exterminate Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is even more brutal and more consequential for the church than it is in the Middle East, the place where Christians suffered ISIS 'genocide,' as the U.S. government officially designated."
Meotti noted that a Nigerian Christian recently was executed by an ISIS child soldier.
"Slaughterhouse workers go on trial in France for abuses to animals," he said. "But the same France has already repatriated more than 250 ISIS fighters, the same people who turn Iraqi churches into slaughterhouses."
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