The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

by John L. Allen

  Residency policies also can have a devastating impact on families. Reportedly, there are some two hundred Christian families in the area living apart today, their members split between the West Bank and Jerusalem. Some villages in the region are under military control, which also makes it challenging for family members to move back and forth. Other difficulties include Christians whose income traditionally derives from agriculture but who have lost a portion of their lands to the construction of Israel’s security barrier, as well as Christians who have lost land to the expansion of Jewish settlements. In 2012, for instance, three thousand acres were reportedly confiscated from fifty-nine Christian families in Beit Jala to continue expansion of the Gilo settlement and the separation wall.

  Hana Bendcowsky, a Jewish Israeli affiliated with the Jerusalem Centre for Christian Jewish Relations, warns of hardening Israeli attitudes toward Christianity. A 2009 survey, she said, found that Israelis between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine hold more negative views of Christians than older generations. At root, she said, Jews in Israel have a hard time thinking of themselves as a majority. They tend to see the Christians in their midst not as an embattled minority, she said, but as a “doubly threatening majority”—part of both the Arab world and the Christian West.

  Among Catholics in the Holy Land, there’s frustration about negotiations that have lingered since 1993 over the Fundamental Agreement between Israel and the Vatican, which among other things was supposed to regulate the tax and legal status of church properties in Israel. The terms of the agreement have never been implemented by the Israeli Knesset, and in the meantime, Israel has declared certain important Christian sites, such as Mount Tabor and Capernaum, to be national parks, overriding Christian control.

  Bernard Sabellah, a Palestinian Christian academic and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, also argues that claims of a growing Christian community inside Israel are misleading. He says that there were roughly 35,000 Christians in the territory of Israel in 1948, while today the number is 110,000. Given the natural rate of demographic increase over a half century, he said, the Christian population today should be 150,000, which means that there are a “missing” 40,000 Christians in Israel. He also said that a recent survey of young Christians in Israel found that 26 percent want to leave—the same percentage as in the Palestinian Territories.

  Christian churches and other sites have also become targets for “price tag” attacks in Israel, a term for assaults carried out by Israeli settlers and their sympathizers intended to exact a price on groups perceived to oppose settlement activity. In December 2012, vandals spray-painted obscenities at the Monastery of the Cross, which is a Greek Orthodox church in Jerusalem. The offensive slogans included “Jesus is a son of a bitch” and “Jesus is an ape.” The vandals also defaced three cars belonging to the monastery, spray-painting “Victory of the Maccabees” and, ironically, “Happy holidays.” A similar attack had occurred ten months earlier at the same church.

  Life is hardly idyllic for Christians inside the Palestinian Territories either. In 2007, the only Christian bookstore operating in the Gaza Strip was firebombed and its owner, Rami Ayyad, kidnapped and murdered. The store had previously been bombed two other times, in February 2006 and April 2007, with the second attack doing substantial damage. Witnesses said that Ayyad was publicly beaten before being killed by Muslim radicals who accused him of attempting to spread Christianity in Gaza. Called the Teacher’s Bookshop, the store had been established by the Palestinian Bible Society, a branch of the Gaza Baptist Church, in 1998, serving the approximately 3,000 Christians living amid a Muslim population of 1.5 million.

  After the assault that left Ayyad dead, Sheik Abu Saqer, leader of an Islamist group known as Jihadia Salafiya, a group suspected of masterminding the April 2007 bookstore bombing, denied any involvement in Ayyad’s killing but accused Gaza’s Christian leadership of “proselytizing and trying to convert Muslims with funding from American evangelicals.” Although Hamas officials condemned the attack and pledged to protect the Christian minority, the bookshop is no longer an ongoing concern.

  In June 2013, the five Christian schools operating in the Gaza Strip, two Catholic and three Protestant, faced closure after the Hamas government issued an order banning coeducational institutions, part of a broad trend toward application of a strict Islamic moral code. Although the order did not single out the Christian schools, they were the only coeducational schools in the Gaza Strip. The order also specified that teachers could not teach classes of the opposite sex, which would force the already impoverished schools to hire additional faculty. For the record, the five schools serve a largely Muslim population.

  Fr. Faysal Hijazin, the Catholic director general of Latin Patriarchate Schools in Palestine and Israel, said the order threatens the Christian presence in the Gaza Strip. “It is a concern that in education things are getting more conservative,” he said. “It reflects the whole society. This is of concern to both Christians and moderate Muslims. It is not easy to be there.”

  Neither is the West Bank free of risks, despite the repeated efforts of the Fatah government to tout their Christian minority as evidence of their openness and worthiness for statehood. Paci, for instance, reported in 2011 that rapidly growing social pressure on the West Bank against mixed Muslim/Christian marriage has meant that unwed couples who have children are increasingly likely to abandon them. She also says that Christian owners of vineyards, who have been producing wine for generations, face mounting pressure to shift to the more morally acceptable but less profitable business of cultivating olives. In 2010, the lone Christian orphanage on the West Bank was shut down under pressure from the Social Affairs Ministry of the Palestinian Authority. In 2003, a seventeen-year-old Christian girl named Rawan William Mansour was raped on the West Bank, allegedly by two members of Fatah who were never prosecuted, while Mansour was forced to flee to Jordan out of fear of being the victim of an honor killing. In 2005, two more Christian teenage girls, in this case sisters, were raped and murdered, and in September 2006, seven Christian churches on the West Bank and Gaza were firebombed amid protests over controversial remarks by Pope Benedict XVI about Islam.

  According to Open Doors, reports indicate that pressure against Christians is increasing in the Palestinian Territories, especially with regard to incidents against Muslim-background believers. Converts to Christianity are frequently discriminated against by the larger community, and often by their own families, if their faith becomes known. According to the Open Doors 2012 report, there was an “honor killing” of a Christian convert from Islam in 2011, though for security reasons they did not publish any details about the assault. In February 2011, a Christian surgeon named Maher Ayyad was attacked when a bomb was hurled at the car in which he was riding. Though Ayyad was unhurt, the car sustained serious damage. Ayyad said that after the attack he began receiving text messages warning him to stop any proselytizing activity, though he denied engaging in any missionary work. Majed El Shafie, president of One Free World International, said at the time that such assaults have become increasingly common. “The Christians in the Palestinian Authority [are] facing persecutions,” he said. “Their homes, their churches—they get attacked almost every day.”

  IRAN

  Iran officially tolerates religious minorities, but in practice minority groups such as Christians, Baha’is and Sufi Muslims often face severe political, legal, economic, and social discrimination. As anti-Western attitudes have hardened, reports suggest that physical attacks, harassment, detention, and imprisonment of religious minorities have intensified.

  Christians are legally prohibited from worshipping in Farsi, the national language. The idea is that the recognized branches of Christianity serve ethnically distinct populations, Armenians and Assyrians, and should restrict their activities to those languages. Conducting religious activity in Farsi, according to authorities, would be tantamount to proselytism. Christian leaders have been required to sign “
loyalty agreements” promising not to engage in any missionary activity directed at Muslims, and religious leaders are subject to tight surveillance by security agents, including when traveling outside the country.

  Members of unrecognized Christian communities are subject to arrest. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, between June 2010 and February 2012 approximately three hundred Christians from various churches and communities were arbitrarily arrested. Human rights groups believe the real number is much higher. Often these Christians are arrested, imprisoned for a brief period, released, and then rearrested. Observers say these detainees face bleak conditions, including sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and the denial of medical care. Reports also say that violence and psychological coercion are used on religious prisoners to compel them to make confessions and to offer information about fellow believers. Sanctions for “apostasy,” meaning conversion from Islam to another religion, are firmly enforced both by the judicial system and by Iranian society. In September 2008, the Iranian parliament approved a new penal code that included the death penalty for apostasy. A committee removed this provision in 2009, but in many cases Iranian judges are willing to base their rulings on religious edicts.

  Despite these pressures, according to some reports Christianity in Iran is growing, especially in a clandestine network of evangelical and Pentecostal “house churches” spread across the country. The Open Doors organization claims that forty years ago, the number of Islamic converts to Christianity living in Iran was just 200, while by 2012 the total had risen to 370,000. The group asserted that there is a “Christian revival” taking shape, especially among youth in Iranian cities.

  Perhaps because of that growth, pressure on Christians seems to be intensifying. In January 2009, three members of the Church of the Assemblies of God were arrested in Tehran, the national capital. They included a husband and wife who had converted to Christianity from Islam. They were charged with leading unauthorized Bible studies in their home and eventually released on bail.

  In March 2009, two female converts from Islam, Maryam Rostampour and Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad, were arrested and charged with acting against the security of the state on the basis of attending illegal religious activities and distributing Bibles. Both were denied medical care, despite suffering from infections and fever. Both were warned they would face lengthy prison sentences if they didn’t embrace Islam. They were eventually released under international pressure, and both women subsequently left the country.

  In December 2009, security agents raided the home of a Christian woman named Hamideh Najafi in the city of Mashhad. She was sentenced to three months of house arrest, and her daughter, who suffers from a kidney condition, was placed in foster care. Najafi and her husband were informed by police officials that their daughter would be returned to their care provided they abandoned the Christian faith and refrained from speaking publicly about their situation.

  In February 2010, a Protestant minister named Rev. Wilson Issavi, a leader in the Assyrian Evangelical Church, was arrested by state security. His church had been shut down in January. Issavi remained behind bars for three months before being released, and his wife reported that he appeared to have been tortured while in custody.

  In October 2010, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a speech in which he warned of a growing Christian presence in the county, blaming “the enemies of Islam for establishing and encouraging the expansion of Christianity in Iran.” In the same month, Iran’s intelligence minister announced that his agents had discovered hundreds of illegal underground churches and were preparing a crackdown. In January 2011, another government official referred to Christian evangelism as a “corrupt and deviant movement” threatening Iran’s national interests.

  In late December 2010 and early January 2011, Iran’s security services launched a wave of arrests of Christians for participating in prohibited “house church” services. According to human rights monitors, roughly seventy people were arrested in the raids and spent varying periods of time in prison. Observers believed the arrests were timed to discourage Christians from using the Christmas holidays as a springboard for missionary activity.

  In January 2011, an Iranian pastor named Behnam Irani, from the city of Karaj, was convicted of crimes against national security and sentenced to a year in prison. He began serving his sentence in May when the forty-one-year-old was informed by authorities that he would actually have to spend five years behind bars due to a previous conviction.

  In March 2011, a Muslim convert to Christianity named Masoud Delijani was arrested during a house church service, along with his wife and nine other Christians, by plainclothes security agents. Delijani was later charged with “having faith in Christianity,” “holding illegal house church gatherings,” “evangelizing Muslims,” and an unspecified action against Iran’s national security. He spent 114 days in custody, mostly in solitary confinement, before being released after his family put up $100,000 in bail. Delijani was arrested again two weeks later, and in February 2012 a Revolutionary Court in the province sentenced him to three years in prison.

  In April 2011, a pastor in the Church of Iran named Behrouz Sadegh-Khanjani and five other church members were sentenced to a year in prison for “propaganda against the regime” by the First Branch of the Revolutionary Court in the southern city of Shiraz. The accused were acquitted of the more serious charge of crimes against national security.

  In May 2011, a Revolutionary Court in the northern Iranian city of Bandar Anzali put eleven members of the Church of Iran on trial on charges of crimes against national security. In this case, the eleven Christians indicted by the regime included a sixty-two-year-old grandmother. As of this writing, the eleven Christians had not yet received a verdict.

  In June 2011, human rights and religious freedom monitors reported an uptick in anti-Christian propaganda delivered through the official state-sponsored media outlets. One such article published on a website directed at Iranian youth claimed that young Christian women were entering stores as a pretext for talking to staff and customers, proposing sexual relations and insulting Islam as means of luring people into conversion. In August 2011, Iranian police seized sixty-five hundred pocket Bibles as they were being transported from one town in northwestern Iran to another. A parliamentary official announced the seizure, claiming that it was a blow against a well-funded campaign to proselytize Iranians, especially young people.

  In December 2011, security agents raided an Assemblies of God church service in Ahvaz, in southwestern Iran, taking worshippers into custody. Most were released after just a few days, but the pastor, named Farhad Sabokroh, and another church member were forced to serve two months behind bars before being released on bail. Media reports indicated that a wave of arrests gathered steam in the first part of 2012, with Christians detained in Tehran, Ahwaz, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Kermanshah. One agency reported that in Isfahan alone, more than a dozen Christians were arrested in less than a month beginning in late February.

  A new round of harassment broke out in June 2013 in the run-up to presidential elections. An Assemblies of God church in Tehran was closed after its pastor, Robert Asserian, was placed under arrest. Not long afterward, three Iranian converts to Christianity were detained following a raid on a worship service of a house church in Isfahan, a city a little over two hundred miles south of Tehran, known in the West as the site of one of Iran’s nuclear technology centers. Reports also surfaced that an evangelical pastor named Behnam Irani, a 1992 convert to Christianity who had been arrested in 2011 for allegedly acting against national security, was facing death in prison because officials had denied him adequate medical care to treat severe ulcers. Activists charged that the neglect amounted to a de facto death sentence for Irani, without the need for a potentially embarrassing formal verdict.

  Firouz Khandjani, a spokesperson for the Church of Iran house church movement, charged that authorities had exploited the distraction created by t
he presidential campaign to tighten the screws.

  “In the West people often seem more interested in the elections than in individual cases of persecution,” Khandjani said. “Authorities … used the electoral calendar in order to suppress Christians.”

  It remains to be seen if the victory of the moderate Hassan Rowhani will materially change the situation. Khandjani said that Rowhani had been the only presidential candidate who explicitly vowed to protect religious minorities but also noted that under Iran’s complex distribution of power, the president’s authority is carefully circumscribed vis-à-vis the Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s the Supreme Leader rather than the president, for instance, who controls the Interior and Intelligence ministries that tend to be most feared by Iranian Christians. In the immediate wake of the election, Khandjani said that Christians had prayed for a Rowhani victory but did not expect “magical solutions.”

  IRAQ

  To be sure, life for Iraq’s Christian minority was no picnic under Saddam Hussein. Christians were consigned to a permanent underclass and reminded of their subjugation in myriad ways. To take one example, Iraqi law required that at least 25 percent of the student population of a public school had to be Christian in order to permit a course in Christianity to be offered, but all it took was one Muslim in order for study of the Qur’an to be obligatory. In addition, Christian families were strongly encouraged to give their newborns traditional Arab Muslim names, as opposed to names associated either with Christianity or the minority Assyrian community.

  Despite the hardships of the Hussein regime, nothing prepared Iraqi Christians for the apocalypse that followed its fall.

  During a Vatican meeting on the Middle East in October 2010, Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, who at the time was still serving as the Chaldean Patriarch of Iraq, described life after the fall of Saddam as “a Calvary” in his “tortured and bloodied country.” Among other things, Delly said, sixteen priests and two bishops had been kidnapped and released only after the church had paid a steep ransom, and other Christians in Iraq had been killed, joining “a line of new martyrs that today pray for us from the Heavens.” Across the Middle East, Iraq has become the leading symbol of the war on Christians, a chilling confirmation that the choice facing Christians in the Middle East is often not between a police state and a vibrant democracy but rather between a police state and annihilation.