Displaying items by tag: Asia

President Herzog acknowledged that ‘ultra-nationalist Jews attacking Christians is on the rise’. Attacks of stones, eggs and rotten fruit are regularly thrown into Jerusalem’s New Polish House. Aggressors broke into the sisters’ private property at nighttime, smashing pots and damaging the front door. Also, several dozen Breslov Hasidic extremists have entered a Catholic church eight times in the early hours, praying and alleging, incorrectly, Elisha’s tomb is there so they can claim Jewish rights over the church property. Police removed them. In a video, Dormition Abbey’s abbot was escorting the German federal minister of Education by the Western Wall when he was asked by an Israeli official to hide the cross he was wearing; saying the cross is ‘really big and inappropriate for this place. It's a Jewish place, you must respect that.’ Pray for God to encourage Christian communities and for church leaders to respond wisely and appropriately to opposition.

Some say ‘to be a Kazakh is to be a Muslim’. Most Kazakhs follow a version of Islam influenced by shamans and indigenous practices. Other Muslim countries send Muslim missionaries to Kazakhstan, successfully converting even ethnic Russians to Islam. After the Soviet Union broke up, the number of mosques grew from 46 to 2,300 in 2020. The government keeps Islam moderate and is the only Central Asian state where Islam has no special status. Pray for freedom from historic spiritual bondages. Kazakhstan's cultural and religious diversity provides many opportunities for evangelising. A number of Kazakh Uzbeks and Uyghurs are turning to Christ and taking the gospel back to their own people. Christianity is still largely an urban phenomenon, but churches and missions (Baptists, Korean groups, Western agencies) are recruiting for village ministry. Pray that the Gospel might be shared in the listeners' language, in the many towns and villages of this sprawling land.

The Iranian authorities are doubling down on policing and severely oppressing Iranian women and girls for defying the return of the morality law which insists women and girls wear headscarves in public with police patrols enforcing obedience. Social media is showing women being violently assaulted by officials and the people helping them to escape are being targeted by the police firing tear gas See At the same time, a clampdown on religious minorities also needs a prayerful response. Over 50 believers were arrested on unknown charges immediately following the reinstatement of the morality police. ‘The reason for this sudden surge in nationwide arrests of Christians is unclear at this stage,’ Article18’s advocacy director Mansour Borji says. ‘What is obvious is that Iran has begun a fresh crackdown on civil liberties, and the traditionally vulnerable groups, like Christians, are on the front line of those targeted.’

Pakistan is one of the world’s leading persecutors of Christians. Iranian and Afghan believers face less persecution than Pakistan’s Christians. Most Christians are in the lower castes, and are taken advantage of by the higher castes. Christian women and girls are vulnerable. Reports indicate a silent epidemic of kidnappings, forced marriages and forced conversions of Christian girls and women. The state authorities do little to counter this practice. This endemic prejudice and persecution is unreported in the West’s media. A typical case is of a 13-year-old Christian girl being kidnapped by a 44-year-old Muslim man. Two days later her father discovered she had converted to Islam and was married to the man, who already had a wife and two children. Every year about 1,000 Christian and Hindu girls and young women are abducted, sexually assaulted, forcefully converted to Islam, and married to their abductors. In the majority of cases the victims are intimidated into silence and remain captive.

Since January weekly protests have filled the streets opposing the government's ‘reasonableness bill’ which removes the Supreme Court's power to cancel government decisions that it views as unfair. On 24 July thousands filled Jerusalem and Tel Aviv streets when Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul bill was passed; the next day doctors struck and protested. Hundreds from both sides of the political divide had prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall ahead of the vote. Intercessions were led by Zionist rabbis supporting Netanyahu and opposition politicians including Benny Gantz who said, ‘There is a rift in the nation that must be treated. Netanyahu must stop the legislation.’ Without far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet his government would collapse. Those ministers insist that the reforms go forward, not watered down. On 27 July activists marched again after the end of Tisha B’Av fast day. ‘You don’t negotiate with dictatorial governments. You fight them’, said one protest group.

They fled war and violence to find safety. They lost their homes, family members, neighbours and friends. They live in makeshift shelters, not knowing when they’ll be able to return home. In Yemen, millions are trapped in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, hoping for a better future. Abidah said, ‘We fled Hudaydah because the war was affecting my daughter. The sounds of rockets hitting the port terrified her. She screamed and could not stop. Now we’re in Aden, she has started talking again.’ An elderly father of ten said, ‘The war made us lose our humanity and value. Life in Aden’s camp is tiring. But complaining to someone other than God is humiliating. We have no future, it’s gone. I hope for a future for our children.'Thousands of children have been killed or maimed since the conflict began. Thousands more have been recruited into the fighting. Years of conflict, misery and grief have left millions in need of mental health and psychosocial services.

Video footage of Tabitha Nazir Gill, a Christian nurse, being beaten up by colleagues went viral in 2021 after she was accused of breaking Pakistan’s penal code by insulting Mohammed, a crime which carries the death sentence. She went into hiding as police investigations continued. Later she said, ‘The mob wanted to kill me but I kept praying to Jesus and I opened my eyes and  felt I saw angels. From that moment I knew that I would be saved. I am thankful to Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God, for giving me my freedom. Jesus is mighty to save.’ She thanked God for those who had secured her safe passage out of Pakistan, including ‘the miracle’ of being granted an immigrant visa to a new country in the West, which cannot be disclosed for safety reasons.

The Hezbollah terror group has recently raised the frequency of provocations on Israel's northern border. On 12 July angry rioters went to the security fence on Israel's northern border with Lebanon to light fires and hurl rocks. Israel’s soldiers (IDF) were forced to fire warning shots to disperse them. Also, recent missile fire near Ghajar only barely missed a military vehicle. A different result would have utterly changed the situation in northern Israel. Hezbollah has illegally erected several tents within the Mount Dov area and has coerced Lebanon’s government into asserting additional claims on Israel, demanding they remove a fence securing the village of Ghajar. ‘No one knows when it will happen, but war is just a matter of time. We are on high alert. There are provocations on the border fence’, said the IDF commander.

On 3 May deadly riots broke out  between the Muslim Meitei tribe and the Christian Kuki-Zo tribes in Manipur. Since then over 130 Kuki-Zo have been killed and over 50,000 displaced. Now that the internet ban has been lifted, a 26-second video has emerged after two months showing dozens of men parading and assaulting two naked Christian women. Elsewhere, a Christian woman’s husband was killed by a mob who then surrounded and sexually assaulted her daughter. Her son was killed trying to stop them. ‘How can the police say they aren’t aware of what happened when they were present while we were assaulted? The bodies of my husband and son were taken by them to the government morgue in Imphal’, she told Al-Jazeera. These are just two of the ongoing violent attacks on Christian women and brutal killings of Christian families, with homes being burned down and communities being terrorised.

On 20 July Iraq expelled the Swedish ambassador only hours after protesters angered by the burning of the Quran in Sweden stormed the Swedish embassy in central Baghdad, scaling the walls of the compound and setting it on fire. Iraq’s prime minister also recalled his country’s chargé d’affaires in Sweden and suspended the working permit of Swedish telecom company Ericsson on Iraqi soil. The burning of the embassy was called by supporters of the influential Iraqi Shia religious and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr, to protest against the second planned burning of a Quran in front of the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm that day. However, although protesters in Sweden kicked and partially damaged the Quran, they did not burn it as promised. In Baghdad, all the Swedish embassy staff are safe. Sweden’s foreign ministry condemned the attack and highlighted the need for Iraqi authorities to protect diplomatic missions. See also Europe article 2, ‘Sweden: religious intolerance’.