The Greatest Human Rights Atrocity of Our Time

Here's a sickening statistic: In the past year, over 2,000 church buildings were attacked, looted, and forcibly closed across the globe, and over 5,600 Christians were martyred for believing in and not denying Christ. Nor was last year particularly exceptional. Every year for the past three decades thousands of Christians have been beaten, raped, tortured, martyred, lost their livelihoods or had their property destroyed.

Given the ongoing persecution of Christians around the world I thought I'd rerun a post from a couple of years ago that illustrates this greatest human rights atrocity since the Holocaust. Here it is:

The recent massacre of over 250 worshiping Christians by Muslim terrorists in Sri Lanka is a reminder that the slaughter of Christians is by far the greatest human rights atrocity of our time, and strangely, one about which much of the American media is silent.

A column by Kirsten Powers, written in the wake of last weekend's horror in Sri Lanka, is worth highlighting.

Powers reminds us of the slow-burning holocaust occurring today around the world but particularly in Muslim and officially atheistic countries. It's the oppression, torture and murder of tens of thousands of Christians whose only crime, like the Christians in ancient Rome, is that they refuse to accept the religion of those in power.

The details are horrifying. It's perhaps the greatest human rights crisis of the last sixty years, but our political leadership and media seem to have little to say about it.

Here are a few excerpts from Powers' essay:

Some of the most harrowing stories about how Christians are persecuted have come from the African country of Eritrea, which Open Doors lists as the twelfth worst country in the world for Christian persecution.

In his 2013 book, The Global War on Christians, reporter John L. Allen Jr., writes that in Eritrea, Christians are sent to the Me’eter military camp and prison, which he describes as a “concentration camp for Christians.” It is believed to house thousands being punished for their religious beliefs.

Prisoners are packed into 40’x38’ metal shipping containers, normally used for transporting cargo. It is so cramped that it’s impossible to lie down and difficult even to find a place to sit. “The metal exacerbates the desert temperatures, which means bone chilling cold at night and wilting heat during the day....believed to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit or higher,” Allen writes.

One former inmate...described [it] as “giant ovens baking people alive.” Prisoners are given next to nothing to drink so “they sometimes end up drinking their own scant sweat and urine to stay alive.”

The prisoners are tortured, sexually abused, and have no contact with the outside world. One survivor of the prison described witnessing a fellow female inmate “who had been beaten so badly her uterus was actually hanging outside her body. The survivor desperately tried to push the uterus back in” but couldn’t prevent the inmate’s excruciating death.

The situation is different but no less horrific in North Korea and Syria.

The worst persecutor of Christians is North Korea, where an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 followers of Jesus are suffering in prison camps for “crimes” such as owning a Bible, going to church, or sharing their faith. In November 2013, it was reported that 80 prisoners were publicly executed, many for possessing Bibles.

Syria, ranked as the third-worst country by Open Doors, has devolved in the last year to a horror show for Christians. The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea noted in December 2013 a message she received from a contact in Syria who reported, “Kidnapping, killings, ransom, rape . . . 2013 is a tragedy for Christians in Syria.

All Syrians have endured great suffering and distress. The Christians, however, often had to pay with their lives for their faith.

Our bishops and nuns have been kidnapped, our political leader killed by torture. After our Christian villages have been occupied, our churches have been destroyed and even mass graves were found in Saddad. [T]he Islamists have put [to] the Christians the alternative: Islam or death. Why [is] the West just watching?”

Powers closes her piece with this:

At a December 2013 speech to a conference organized by Georgetown’s Religious Freedom Project, Allen told the audience, “I always ask Christians in countries [where persecution occurs], what can we do for you? The number one thing they say is, “Don’t forget about us.”

It would certainly be welcome if our leaders in Washington would show the world that they haven't forgotten these wretched martyrs and that they care as deeply for them and their circumstances as they do for, say, immigrants seeking to enter our country illegally.