A Witness Unto Death:

Bodies of Christian Martyrs Returned to Egypt

Barnabas Fund

Last week the bodies of the 20 Egyptian Christians martyred by Islamic State (IS) in Libya in 2015 were returned to Egypt. This is a very poignant reminder of IS’s activities, their systematic killing and their brutality. A total of 21 people were beheaded by IS including one Ghanaian. According to a video of the incident posted by IS, the martyred wore orange jumpsuits and were brutally murdered at a beach location in Sirte, an IS stronghold at the time. Their bodies were recovered when the area was recaptured from IS in October last year and eventually forensically identified by doctors.

These 20 were among the many displaced Egyptians who risked their lives trying to find work in an increasingly lawless and chaotic Libya, in the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in 2011. Many hundreds of Christian families have since fled their homes in North Sinai in Egypt, fearing for their lives after IS issued death threats against all Christians in the region early in 2017.


 
Many Christians will have been moved by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs account of martyrdoms such as Tyndale, who was strangled and burnt at the stake, in obedience to Christ during the Reformation. It is difficult to imagine their suffering and faithfulness “unto death” (Revelation 2:10) in the Western church today, where Christians still enjoy relatively unrestricted freedom of belief and worship. The notion of “sacrifice” as part of Christian life has become abstract and perhaps more connected with giving up time, money, resources or personal comforts in Christian service.

Egyptian Christians often call martyrdom a “second baptism”.

ISIS Call to Arms

London Declared an Easy High-Value Target

Virginia Hale
BreitbartLondon

ISIS has singled out crowded London streets as “ideal targets” for supporters to mow down pedestrians in the latest edition of the terror group’s online magazine.
Published in ten languages, the most recent issue of ISIS’ magazine Rumiyah published tutorials on arson, knife and vehicle attacks, naming Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus in London as locations at which jihadis should “flatten [non-Muslims] under trucks”, The Sunday Times reports.

A piece on “terror tactics” tells supporters the best type of vehicle to use in a terror attack  — “double-wheeled, load-bearing” trucks with a “slightly raised chassis and bumper”, which are “fast in speed or rate of acceleration” are identified as features which would maximise the number of casualties. would-be jihadis are told to look out for.  Methods ISIS recommends for obtaining such a vehicle include taking one “from a kafir [non-Muslim] by force or deception”, or by “‘borrowing’ from a kafir or murtadd [apostate].”

“The language of force, the language of killing, stabbing and slitting throats, chopping off heads, flattening them under trucks, and burning them alive, until they give the jizyah [non-beleiver’s tax] while they are in a state of humiliation,” reads a paragraph from Rumiyah’s latest edition.

Letter From the Islamic Killing Fields

'Women Survive. They Do Not Live.'

Sulome Anderson
Stuff: The Washington Post

A handcuffed man sits on a dirty couch in a small room. The walls are painted a sickly, pale yellow that is even less appealing in the harsh fluorescent lighting. Two fighters and an officer clad in green camouflage stand by, watching.  The prisoner is in his mid- to late 30s, relatively fair-skinned for an Iraqi, with curly auburn hair and light brown eyes.  According to the Peshmerga, the fighting force of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), he was the leader of an Islamic State intelligence unit.

His jailers explain that the prisoner was responsible for interrogating people in Islamic State-held territory, trying to gather information and root out any internal dissent.  Tell me about your wife," I begin. "How did you treat her?"

"My wife completely covered her body and face and never left the house without me," he replies sullenly.

Erasing the Past for Purity's Sake

More on ISIS-Like Purity

Massey, history, and memory

Why we honour flawed heroes

Jonathan Tracy
Stuff

I am deeply troubled by the recent call to rename Massey University, on the ground of racist utterances made by New Zealand Prime Minister William Massey a century ago.  There is not a single historical figure, of any race, nation, culture, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or political creed, who could possibly stand the test of absolute ideological purity by modern standards.

Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi both advocated forms of racial segregation and discrimination.  Should their homelands therefore stop honouring them as national martyrs and liberators?

There have been calls to change the name of Massey University because of racist comments made by William Massey almost a century ago.

As for names of New Zealand places or institutions, Abel Tasman, the Duke of Wellington, the Earl of Auckland, Viscount Palmerston, and Queen Victoria all held opinions that would today get them banished from polite society.  If we must shun every great man or woman of the past whose views did not precisely match our own, the only solution is to declare a Cultural Revolution, a Year Zero, and simply wipe the slate clean.

A Volunteer Group Fighting ISIS

A Private War

A group of hackers has decided to wage its own private war against ISIS.  They are mercenaries without pay. According to a report in Epoch Times they have worked out how to take control of ISIS twitter accounts, which they then exploit to their own ends.  The group claims they also see a trove of material which would be very interesting to intelligence agencies.

We are not sure about the ethics of all this--being a private unofficial group and all, but presumably it is something which those nations presently engaged in undeclared war against ISIS should be doing in spades.  Maybe they are.  Who knows?

Evil Unmasked

PHOTOS: The Dungeons Islamic State Uses for Yazidi Sex Slaves

Mary Chastain
BreitbartNews

Officials investigating areas previously controlled by the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) have found underground dungeons the terrorist group uses to keep its sex slaves, most of the Yazidi minority religious sect. The whereabouts of the women forced into these dungeons are unknown.

The covers to the dungeons are the only giveaway they exist. The women lived in the tiny holes–cramped and in complete darkness. Those in the prisons kept diaries on the walls.









No one knows exactly how long ISIS kept the women in the cells or where they fled.

The Yazidi women who do escape tell their stories to the world.  “They took young girls, seven, nine and 10 years old,” explained Aveen, 23, to NBC News in early December. ISIS held her for almost a year before she escaped.

Margaret Sanger Would Be Excited

Islamic State Issues Fatwa Against Children with Down Syndrome 

Murders 38 Disabled Infants

Thomas Williams

Breitbart News

The Islamic State has reportedly issued a fatwa ordering the elimination of children with Down syndrome and other congenital disabilities, reminiscent of Hitler’s infamous “Aktion T4” program, which administered forced “euthanasia” on an estimated 300,000 disabled persons.

According to the Iraqi activist blog Mosul Eye, sharia judges have ruled that ISIS followers are authorized to kill infants with Down Syndrome or congenital deformities. Already since the religious decree (fatwa) was issued, militants have killed at least 38 children between one week and three months old by lethal injection or suffocation.

Proxy Wars

Ignoring the Home Front

We have watched some of the speeches made in the House of Commons calling for British air strikes against ISIL in Syria and Iraq.  A sample--a speech by Labour MP, Hilary Benn--can be found here.

At one point in  his speech, Benn reviewed some of the horrors and murderous villainy committed by the Caliphate.

Now Mr Speaker, no-one in this debate doubts the deadly serious threat we face from Daesh and what they do, although sometimes we find it hard to live with the reality. We know that in June four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. We know that in August the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. And we know that in recent weeks there has been the discovery of mass graves in Sinjar, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too old to be sold for sex. 

He also referred to the threat of terrorist attacks, inspired and aided by the Caliphate, in the UK.   There is a clear and present danger in that country--and indeed throughout the West, including New Zealand.

ISIS Confronting the West

Barbarians At the Gates of the Infidels

Janet Daley, writing in The Telegraph shows that she just does not get it.  In considering and evaluating the Enemy, she draws the conclusion that the soldiers and irregulars of ISIS are insane.

Whatever this is, it is not a clash of civilisations. The concept of “civilisation” scarcely comes into it. Nor is it a struggle between competing sets of values, or a religious war, or a battle with an alien culture. There is no debate here – as there was in the Cold War – about how it is best for men to live: the enemy has stated explicitly that it does not revere life at all. On the contrary, it is in love with self-inflicted death, which it sees as the highest moral achievement.

This is not even war in any comprehensible sense. Where are the demands, the negotiable limits, or the intelligible objectives? It is not the modern world versus medievalism, or the secular enlightenment trying to deal with fundamentalist religion. It isn’t anything that can be encompassed in the vocabulary of coherent, systematic thought in which we are now accustomed to describe the world. This is just insanity.

By insanity, we expect that she means the Caliph of the Caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is without reason and quite mad.  We also expect that she thinks all his followers likewise are insane.

In fact, Daley is arguably the one deluded and living in a make-believe world.

ISIS Driving People to Acknowledge Christ as Lord

"They Are Just Sick of Islam"

By Leah Marieann Klett (news@gospelherald.com)
Gospel Herald

More and more Kurdish Muslims living in Iraq are turning to Christ after witnessing the brutality of extremist groups like ISIS, who carry out horrific acts in the name of Allah, Christian aid workers have revealed.

A ministry leader in the Kurdish Region of Iraq told the Christian Aid Mission that his organization can barely keep up with the desire of refugees to learn about Christ and the Bible, which has grown increasingly strong since ISIS overtook many parts of the region. "They're just sick of Islam," he said. "People are very hungry to know about Christ, especially when they hear about miracles, healing, mercy and love." He added, "As terrifying and horrifying as ISIS is, they did us a great favor because they came and have shown them all the killing, saying that it's all in the Koran verses. So now we don't have to say much, we just say the truth."

Numbers released by the UN in January estimated the Kurdish Region of Iraq is hosting 900,000 refugees, around 233,000 from Syria and the rest from elsewhere in Iraq. As well as Kurds, who have fled northern Syria, the region has also accepted thousands of Arabs feeling the cities of Anbar province, which the terrorist group captured in 2014. The ministry director revealed that his organization provides aid to displaced people in tents and whatever dilapidated or unfinished buildings they can find for shelter, with needs for blankets, heaters, food and diapers still being high.

After showing refugees the love of Christ by meeting their needs, aid workers later bring Bibles, he said. "We just help because we love them, and maybe the next time we visit we tell them about Jesus and give them Bibles," he said. "We believe in the power of the Word of God. We don't have many preachers. We don't have many missionaries, but we have the Word of God that we're able to print, purchase and deliver to the people and their children."

The leader said there has a been a great "awakening" among Muslims in northern Iraq, citing many conversion accounts he has personally witnessed or heard secondhand from local churches.

Removing Scales From Eyes

Properly Re-Setting the Chess Board

The doctrine of divine judgement occupies most of the revelation of Holy Scripture.  Measured by volume of content, the major subject concerns God's wrath upon sin and sinners.  One imagines the reason for this is that God is holy and righteous: evil must be punished.  His purity and holiness demand it.

From the time that Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, God's judgement upon sin looms large in the Bible's unfolding story.  Yet it is a truth which many Christians, particularly modern evangelical Christians, would struggle to acknowledge, let alone reverently accommodate in their doctrinal house.

Just to reinforce the point, we would remind ourselves of the Deluge upon the entire human race, apart from Noah and his family; of the plagues upon Egypt; of the judgement upon Israel in the desert where a whole generation perished because of their unbelief and loyalty to idols.  We would go on to refer to Sodom and Gomorrah--which became an abiding symbol for God's holy wrath upon extreme evil, including sin associated with homosexual lust and rape.  We would recite God's judgement upon the Canaanites, the Amalekites, the Edomites, the Moabites.  We would refer to the prophets from Elijah onwards whose primary obligation was to warn Israel and the surrounding nations of the judgements of God about to fall.  We would meditate upon the fortunes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the ten lost tribes.  We would think of the Imprecatory Psalms (rarely read by Christians today).  We would think of the recorded writings of the major and minor prophets which are primarily focused upon the judgements of God upon Israel and the surrounding nations.  The accounts and the warnings go on for pages and pages, chapter after chapter.

Ah, but the New Testament-well, yes, that's different. We live in "Gospel days".

Another Lone-Wolf Attack

Progress

A gunman with a Kalashnikov rifle and knives has been taken down and arrested by French authorities.  The high speed train was running from Amsterdam to Paris.

A gunman has shot and wounded three people on a high-speed train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris before being overpowered by passengers and arrested by police. The shooting happened at around 6pm as the Thalys train was travelling near Arras in northern France, the French state rail company SNCF said. French media said the gunman had shot a Kalashnikov on board the train, and was also armed with knives. The local paper La Voix du Nord reported that two US marines on the train had overpowered the man. The paper reported that the marines had intervened when the man was loading heavy ammunition in a toilet on the train. Both marines were reported to have been injured, one by gunfire, the other by a knife.[The Guardian]

The way this sort of thing normally plays out is that the authorities remain agnostic and non-committal on the reasons, motivation, and causes of the attack, particularly if there is just one person involved.

But a blow-by-blow account in The Telegraph appears to show that this mould has been broken--at least on this occasion:

The Devil's Wind

Christians Used as ‘Form of Currency’ by ISIS as Mass Kidnappings Continue

Mary Chastain
Breitbart News

Christians in the Middle East still live in fear as the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) remains unchallenged in Iraq and Syria. Christian organizations are attempting to help Christians, but for many, it is too late.

“Christians have become a form [of] currency in this tragedy,” explained John Newton, spokesman for Aid to the Church in Need, to the Christian Post. “I know of one priest who was kidnapped for two months… they asked for a ransom of $120,000, which the family managed to raise and deliver… But hours later, the priest was killed and his body cut up, with pieces of him sent in a box to the family.”

Newton said it is hard for his charity and the others to keep track of the kidnapped priests. Militants kidnapped archbishops throughout 2013 as they tried to rescue two other kidnapped priests.  “No one knows who took the archbishops, nor what their fate was, but the two priests they were trying to free have since been executed,” said Newton.

Redemption in Action

‘Jewish Schindler’ Saves Dozens of Yazidis and Christians from Islamic State

by Donna Rachel Edmunds 

Breitbart London

A Canadian Jewish businessman has spearheaded efforts to rescue Iraqi Yazidi and Christian girls from slavery after the girls were captured by ISIS troops, using money donated privately by business contacts. The businessman has cited Oskar Schindler, who rescued Jewish children from the holocaust, as his inspiration.

Last summer the world looked on in horror as ISIS swept through north Iraq, home to Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and Yazidis. Hundreds of thousands fled before them, but thousands more starved to death in the desert, or were captured by Islamic forces. Girls in particular were bartered for in the markets, standing naked while men bought them as sex slaves.

But while most of the west turned off their TV sets, Canadian entrepreneur Steve Maman decided to take positive action. Making contacts in Iraq who could negotiate the release of the girls, Mr Maman raised thousands of Canadian dollars to finance a rescue operation, The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI).

History Repeating

Hearing And Seeing No Evil Facilitates It

A new Islamic State propaganda video has appeared in which Islamic believers in Germany are urged either to decamp and migrate to fight for ISIS in Syria, or otherwise commit murders in Germany.  This is now a fairly standard Islamic State MO, but apparently the first addressed specifically to Germany.

Oliver Lane, writing for Breitbart London, reports

Calling on Muslims to become ‘lone wolf’ killers Mohamed Mahmoud, who was jailed for four years for terrorism offences in Germany but escaped to the Islamic world says: “My brothers and sisters, either you come here and join the Mujahideen, or you lead the jihad in Germany and Austria. You do not need much, just take a large knife and kill every unbeliever. They are like dogs!”.

Whether anyone in Germany will answer to the call remains to be seen.  But when such calls have been made, it has resulted in murder elsewhere in Europe.  What is absolutely staggering, however, is how the European authorities deliberately turn a blind eye to the terrorist or Islamic connections.

Heads in Sand

Face Reality: Many Muslims Support ISIS

by Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
June 16, 2015

In the last week of May, the Qatar-based Arabic news network Al-Jazeera polled its Arabic-language audience on the question: "Do you support the victories of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in your region?"

The results were shocking. Of the 56,881 Arabic-speaking respondents, a whopping 81% voted yes. The results of this online survey may not be scientific. But they do provide anecdotal evidence of what many see as a rise in the support of Islamism in the Arab Middle East, among Muslims in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and in the diaspora in Britain and France.

On Monday, a 17-year-old Briton became that country's youngest suicide bomber after he blew up a brand new SUV packed with explosives in the northern Iraqi town of Baiji. Talha Asmal had Arabized his name to Abu Yusuf al-Britani and is the latest young person used by jihadi Islamists as cannon fodder in their quest to establish an Islamic caliphate. This is laid out in sharia law, as a precursor to the Islamic Armageddon enshrined in Hadith literature, based on Prophet Mohammed's prophesy.

Islam Increasingly Self-Conscious and True to Itself

ISIS to Western Christians: "You Won't Have Safety ... Until You Embrace Islam"

by Raymond Ibrahim
The Christian Post
April 20, 2015

^{Originally published under the title, "ISIS Slaughters Ethiopian Christians, Vows to Slaughter Western Christians"}

Islamic State terrorists behead Ethiopian Christian migrant laborers in Libya on April 19.

Approximately two months after the Islamic State (IS) published a video depicting its members slaughtering 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, on Sunday, April 19, the Islamic jihadi organization released another video of more Christians in Libya being massacred, this time for not paying jizya—extortion money demanded of the "People of the Book" according to Koran 9:29.

Two scenes appear in the 29-minute-long video published by al-Furqan, the Islamic State's media wing. The first scene consists of a group of Christian Ethiopians dressed all in black, on their knees, with their arms tied behind their backs. Masked IS members stand behind the Ethiopians with rifles aimed at their heads. According to the video, this scene takes place in the city of Fezzan. The Christian captives are called "Worshippers of the cross belonging to the hostile Ethiopian Church."

The second scene shows more Christian Ethiopians dressed in orange uniforms and standing on the shores of Barqa, the same region where 21 Egyptian Christians were earlier decapitated for refusing to convert to Islam.

Other scenes include the narrator referencing the fatwas of medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya that proclaim all Christians "infidels." Then Abu Malik ibn Ans al-Nashwan, apparently one of the group's leaders, appears saying that "The dealings of the Islamic State with Christians under its authority is according to Allah's Sharia [Islamic law]. Jizya [tribute] is imposed on those who accept, and war on those who resist."

Letter From New Zealand (About a Christian Dentist Who Escaped ISIS)

The Dentist Who Escaped Isis

Rachel Smalley
NZ Herald
March 14, 2015

One day, he was a prosperous dental surgeon. The next, he was taken from his car at gunpoint and thrown in a bloodstained cell, where he watched as the other prisoners were taken out, one by one, to be shot. Ashour tells Rachel Smalley how he survived.



"Do you want the whole story?" he asks.  "Yes, if you can," I say. "I hear it's quite a story."

His name is Ashour (surname withheld for his protection) and he will soon turn 30. He is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon from Mosul but for the past six months he has lived in a crowded church in Kurdistan, Iraq. He has a bag of clothes, some blankets and a pillow, but little else.  "It's not so bad," Ashour says. "I am displaced but I still have my life."

Ashour is one of two million Iraqis displaced after fleeing Isis and its jihadist agenda of torture, indiscriminate killing and religious persecution.  Almost one million have sought refuge in Kurdistan, the small, semi-autonomous region in the north of the country, sheltering in schools, informal tent settlements, churches, and the bare, concrete skeletons of unfinished buildings that pepper the Middle East's landscape.

I meet Ashour in Duhok, a city encircled by mountains in the rich, fertile basin of the Tigris River.

Islamic Millenarians Clean the Slate

The Islamic State's Shocking Assault on History

by Alexander H. Joffe
The National Interest
March 11, 2015

(Originally published under the title, "ISIS' Shocking Assault on History.")

Members of ISIS use sledgehammers to destroy a statue at Mosul Museum in an undated video made public by the group last month.

The terrible spectacle of Islamic State (ISIS) members destroying ancient Mesopotamian statuary in the Mosul Museum and at the Assyrian site of Nimrud has shocked the world, as intended. These actions were met with swift condemnation from the world's scholars and cultural authorities, as well as its political authorities. To Western eyes, the perpetrators' self-evident glee was especially bizarre. From childhood, we are taught to tread carefully in museums lest we damage artifacts. So what comes next for archeological treasures in the Middle East?

The problem is that in its accompanying statements, the Islamic State made it perfectly clear its motivations derived from Islam. A spokesman for the group, speaking at the scene of destruction, said:

Nothing New Here . . .

Unintended Irony

ISIS has attracted much loathing over recent days.  Its wanton destruction of historical artefacts has outraged many.  The heading in The Telegraph said it all:

Islamic State's thugs are trying to wipe an entire civilisation from the face of the earth

Just as the Nazis destroyed synagogues as well as those who worshipped in them, so Isil aspires to erase all traces of those it condemns as kuffar

Columnist Tom Holland went on to write:

Last week, a video was released showing the destruction of antiquities in Mosul’s museums. Since the antiquities themselves were probably smashed months ago, the dust in the display-rooms will long since have settled. Meanwhile, in the world beyond, the brutal and deliberate attack on treasures spanning millennia is already yesterday’s news.

The Islamic State, whose goons perpetrated the vandalism, appreciate more cynically than anyone that the world’s media feeds on a rapid turnover of atrocities. One succeeds another in a murderous churn. Why, then, should the destruction of statues matter more than the loss of human life? It is a question that troubles me: for I must acknowledge, if I am honest, that no images from the hell that is the Islamic State have upset me more than those which showed a winged bull more than two-and-a-half thousand years old being deliberately and methodically power-drilled.

His conclusion: