I found a copy of the classic book entitled Fox’s Book of Martyrs on the website Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL). The author John Fox was born in England in 1517. He died on April 18, 1587. The edition at CCEL begins with Nero’s persecuting of Christians circa 67 AD and culminates in the 1820’s with the mission efforts of an American Adoniram Judson. Obviously John Fox could not write past 1587 so the later editions were added by others.
The earliest days of Christianity prior to Constantine the Great essentially making the faith the State religion of the Roman Empire in the early 300s AD. It was perfectly legal to persecute Christians in some of the vilest ways prior to State protection. Guess where the state sanctions vile persecutions are going in the 21st century? Let me help your guess. It is a state that absolutely no other nation in the global community of nations recognize as a sovereign state. That unrecognized nation calls itself the Islamic State as well as claiming to Sunni Muslims to be a Caliphate.
The Islamic purists in Nigeria call themselves Boko Haram and they control wide swaths of northern Nigeria. Al Shabaab’s persecution has been as brutal as the Islamic State and Boko Haram but have not been as militarily successful on their home stomping grounds in Somalia.
Justin Smith eruditely addresses this Islamic persecution of Christians in the 21st century.
JRH 4/12/15
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Martyrs for Christ and The Butchers of Islam
By Justin O. Smith
Sent: 4/11/2015 2:43 PM
Christians, Jews and other religious minorities, such as Yazidis, Turkmen and Shabak, are currently being systematically exterminated across the Middle East and North Africa, especially in Iraq and Syria. As the Islamic State, Boko Haram and Al Shabaab repeatedly boast of horrific attacks on these religious minorities, the Christians and other victims are far less concerned with meaningless "Religious Freedom Acts" signed by Obama (Aug 2014), than they are with simply surviving; they need righteous world leaders, who will fight the evil marching towards every nation worldwide - the evil of the oppressive, totalitarian ideology of Islam.
On April 2nd, 2015, the international community witnessed 147 Christian students at Garissa University in Kenya singled out and murdered by Al Shabaab Islamofascist terrorists. And then on Easter Sunday, Islamic State fascist thugs destroyed the Church of the Virgin Mary in northeastern Syria, marking the latest in a long series of attacks against Christians during this decade.
Statistics from numerous sources, like Open Doors and PEW Research Center, show that Christians, who once represented 20% of the Middle East's population have been reduced to 5% of the population in the Middle East. It is also safe to say that nearly three million Christians, in both Iraq and Syria, now number less than a combined total of 300,000, as they have fled or been slaughtered.
In January 2015, forty-five Christian churches were burned in Niamey, Niger alone, and two thousand people were murdered in the town of Baga, Nigeria, which was burned to the ground (BBC). According to Open Borders, an organization dedicated to "serving persecuted Christians worldwide", roughly 3.2 million residents in Nigeria have left their homes, since the rise of the Islamic terror army of Boko Haram. For the same reason, thousands of Christians are evacuating Diffa, the border region between Niger and Nigeria, and seeking refuge at the military camps at Zinder.
Whenever Boko Haram, Al Shabaab and the Islamic State occupy an area, a common and terrible theme emerges, as they demand that the people identify themselves as Muslim or Christian, Allahu Akbar or Alleluia. A great number of these Christians truly live their faith, and they refuse to deny Jesus in order to save themselves. They die as martyrs for Christ.
In January of this year, David Curry, president of Open Doors USA, reported that 2014 was the most violent year of global Christian persecution. Curry also released the World Watch List, which named North Korea, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, Eritrea and Nigeria the nations that are most hostile towards Christians. The overwhelming common thread in nine of these is the Islamic ideology.
Since July 2014, the Islamic State has demanded Iraq's Christians must convert to Islam, pay extra taxes or be killed. The Islamic State has massacred and enslaved thousands of Christians and followers of the ancient Yazidi faith, murdered hundreds more from the Shabak religious minority, ransacked the tomb of Jonah in Mosul, destroyed a 7th Century Greek Orthodox Church in Tikrit, bombed a memorial of the Armenian genocide in Dair Alzour, Syria and beheaded 21 Coptic Christians in Libya.
These Islamic savages surpass the Nazis and Communists in their depravity. Islamofascist "soldiers" teach Muslim boys how to slice off the heads of the kafir, the infidels, the Christians and the enemies of Allah. They bury people alive and butcher little children. They have delivered hundreds of girls and women as sex-slaves and unwilling "brides", torturing and raping them, as reported by the International Center for Investigative Reporting.
Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA) is personally troubled by these atrocities. She is a first generation American and a Chaldean Catholic, whose mother is Armenian and whose father is an Assyrian Christian from Iraq. She recently told the 'Washington Examiner':
"We're coming up to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide and when we look over our shoulders at history, we say 'never again, we will never forget.' So from both sides of the family, exactly what my grandmother described and all the elders of the family escaped is [again] taking place."
Terrorized Christians and religious minorities unable to reach safety have been begging for help from anyone, and while some U.S. leaders have expressed the dire need to help them, so far, the vaunted international community has not acted forcefully enough to stop these Islamofascists from annihilating Christians and others. Their efforts have been small and futile, providing insufficient aid, as this new Holocaust is continuing to grow.
Kaldo Oghanna, an Assyrian Christian who helped train fellow Christians to combat these Islamic terrorists, told the Wall Street Journal, "No one has protected the minorities, and no one will in the future." [See Also World Religion News]
Some experts, such as Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute, have called for "hard protections" and "safe zones" for people without the ability to protect themselves. Although $1.6 billion from the U.S. National defense Authorization Act has been allocated to aid Christians, ethnic minorities and their "local forces" in the Nineveh Plain and surrounding regions, this is far from fully addressing the broader scope of the problem, as the progeny of terrorists continue to ply the family trade across the globe.
How much longer will the world leaders continue to look the other way? When will the U.S. and Europe and the world's Christian nations do something substantial and concrete to defend and protect our Christian brothers and sisters, who are persecuted, exiled and slain solely for being Christian?
On Veteran's Day of 2011 at the Preserving Freedom Conference in Madison, TN, Dr. Justin Akujieze revealed that the entire northern half of Nigeria had already been, in essence, conquered by the Islamists, as they have unilaterally declared Sharia Law without comment, debate or media discussion. At the same time, Muslims were committing genocide against the Christian Igbo tribes of Nigeria by burning them alive by the thousands, and these Islamofascists are now moving to control the entire country. As Dr. Justin appealed to those in the audience for their help in saving the rest of Nigeria from this Islamofascist onslaught, the emotion in his voice rang true, “Today is the last day and we must not wither. We must confront this head-on and together we will win.”
The Butchers of Islam have created a global crisis. They are an existential threat to families, human rights and religious communities in the United States and Europe too, not just in the Middle East and Africa, and as such, America and any other rightfully concerned nations must wage a relentless, vicious, intense war against them and brutally obliterate them wherever they are found: Destroy the destroyers of everything righteous, those lovers of Death, or continue doing next to nothing and watch Christianity in many regions become a footnote in history.
By Justin O. Smith
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Edited by John R. Houk
All links are by the Editor.
Any text enclosed by brackets are by the Editor.
© Justin O. Smith
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