When *Maya was just 19 years old, ISIS soldiers invaded her home in Baghdad, Iraq, and ordered that she and the rest of her Christian family either convert to Islam or pay a heavy fee to stay in their home. If they refused, they would be killed.
The family did not convert, but they tried to pay the fee. It wasn’t enough.
When the soldiers came back, they shot Maya’s brother in front of the family and kidnapped her sister. They warned that they would come back and kill the second daughter if the family did not leave or convert to Islam.
The remaining members of Maya’s family fled to Jordan, and happily learned that their kidnapped daughter had escaped to Australia.
It was stories like Maya’s that inspired Gia Chacon last year to found For the Martyrs, a non-profit organization that raises awareness of the plight of persecuted Christians throughout the world and advocates for religious freedom….
“I wanted to do something in the United States for the people of the West, to not only wake them up to the reality of what’s going on around the world, but also connect them to know that we’re one body of Christ. When one member suffers, we all suffer.”
This May, For the Martyrs will host the first March for the Martyrs on May 9 in Long Beach, California….
The march will be immediately followed by a ‘Night of Prayer for the Persecuted’ featuring speakers such as Sean Feucht from Bethel Music, Father Benedict Kiely, and others who will highlight the plight of persecuted Christians and what can be done for them.
“Our purpose for that night is to pray for the persecuted, worship the Lord for victory and for protection over the persecuted, but also to gain insight into the reality of Christian persecution and learn what we can do as a body of Christ in America for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world,” Chacon said….
The above comes from a March 5 story on the site of the Catholic News Agency.
Killing others to force people to convert to a religion is, in my opinion, never justifiable. However, killing in the name of religion has been going on for centuries. Even the Crusades were waged to drive Muslims out of the Holy Land.
The Church opposes forced conversions of any kind. Muslims drove Christians and Jews out of the Holy Land (or killed them, forced them to convert or subjugated them as low class members of society). We Eastern Christians asked Western/Roman Catholics for help during the Crusades (which, of course, didn’t work out so well). This is, of course, simplified. Yet, “killing in the name of religion” for the past four centuries has overwhelmingly involved Muslims. Look at the current list of armed conflicts in the world today. Christians and others are being killed and driven from their homelands by Muslims, many of whom are fanatical and even “moderate” Muslims are often supportive or at least too afraid to speak out. The Crusades are interesting, and I know somethings about them, but, vastly more critical is what is happening in the world today. Lord, have mercy on us all.
Get your facts straight. The Crusaders fought with the Muslims in the Holy Land because other Christians had been mistreated by Muslims when they went there. There have always been Jews and Christians in the Holy Land. The Christians since Christianity started — think the twelve Jewish Apostles who helped start the Christian religion.
There were also Jews and Christian, including monasteries, in northern Africa before the Muslims invaded that territory and killed many Jews and Christians because they would not convert.