Nigeria: ‘Open season’ of killing Christians, 1,000 massacred in 2019

Muslim militants in Nigeria brutally executed 11 Christians on Christmas, capping a year-long “open season” that saw more than 1,000 Christians killed by Muslims who considered it their right and duty to do so.

Donning orange jumpsuits reminiscent of the Libyan Muslims who killed 21 Christians on a beach in 2015, militants from the Boko Haram-related Islamic State West African province either shot in the back of their heads or slit their throats on video. Targeting of Christians on Christmas is common in the Muslim world.

“The message is to the Christians of the world,” a spokesman for the group says in both Arabic and Hausa in the video, according to Christianity Today. “Those who you see in front of us are Christians, and we will shed their blood as revenge for the two dignified sheikhs.”

Those two are Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former ISIS caliph killed by US troops in an October raid in Syria and Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, his purported successor, killed the next day, Christianity Today reported.

These types of attacks occur because many Muslims can’t conceive of a secular government and therefore think America is a “Christian nation.” According to the Koran, a nation must be governed by religious leaders.

With a population of 200 million, Nigeria is evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, but with the advent of al-Qaeda and ISIS, extremists have been agitating in marginalized zones to take over semi-secular governments through Africa and Southeast Asia.

In its report, Britain’s Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust estimated that 6,000 Christians have been killed by Boko Haram and Fulani Herdsmen since 2015. Another 12,000 left their native areas and sought safety elsewhere as refugees.

“Islamist Fulani militia continue to engage in an aggressive and strategic land grabbing policy in Plateau, Benue, Tarab, Souther Kaduna and parts of Bauchi state,” the HART report stated. “They attack rural villages, force villagers off their lands and settle in their place — a strategy that is epitomized by the phrase: Your land or your blood.”

The Nigerian House of Representatives has classified the slaughter as a genocide but has failed to employ meaningful measures to halt it, according to reports.

“Every day we carry new corpses to the cemetery,” a Nigerian pastor said. “They kill farmers. They destroy our homes and churches. They kidnap and rape women.” Read the rest: killing of Christians in Nigeria.

After seeing the sex slave market, ISIS recruit flees terror group

By Jamie Roman

After seeing ISIS capture and sell Muslim women as sex slaves, recruit Abu Abdullah defected and told his story on a YouTube video uploaded by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism.

Wearing a black head covering the effectively masks his identity, Abdullah tells how he was drawn to ISIS because of the chance to live the golden age of authentic Islam, as written in the Koran.

But after seeing jihadis bid for women on the auction block, he now utterly disavows the extremist group that is progressively losing the territory they seized between Iraq and Syria in 2014.

“As a brother in the faith, I swear to Allah: they don’t know anything about Islam,” he says in Arabic, according to translated subtitles. “They are not Islamic. They are not really Muslims.”

As a new recruit, Abu was made a prison guard. Almost immediately, the hoped-for utopia was a madhouse of hellish Vikings where pillaging and raping is condoned as hallah, permissible.

“They turn women into slaves,” he says. “They take the girls as slaves and behead the parents. Then they sell the girls.”

What disturbed Abu most was the auctioning off of Muslim women. A literal interpretation of the Koran allows for captured women to be war spoils as long as she is not Muslim. But ISIS, who are sunnis, expanded that permission to include Muslims of a different type, perhaps shia.

“Is it OK for a Muslim woman to become a sex slave?” he asks. “In what religion can a woman be a slave?”

As he narrates, clips are shown of clandestinely-filmed videos of women slaves and ISIS fighters joking about getting girls. The video is part of a series by ICSVE, a Washington-based collective of researchers dedicated to countering extremism in any religion. Their website clarifies that they have no government sponsorship, and they don’t collaborate with spy agencies. It is not a Christian group.

He personally saw the auction block. Iraqi women were up for sale that day.

“Some of the brothers tried to get me to take a woman,” Abdullah says. “I told them, ‘This isn’t right.’ He said, ‘She is a slave, so it is halal.’ I told him, ‘Don’t you know those are Muslim women?”

Abu made the extremely risky decision to escape from ISIS. If he were caught, he would be executed. But Abu made it to freedom, by means he doesn’t tell in the video, and he’s unmasking the rapists masquerading a faithful followers of Islam.

“In the anme of Allah, the most merciful, the most gracious, I address my brothers and all young people, Europeans and Arabs, don’t join ISIS,” he says grimly. “They know nothing about Islam.”

Launched in July of 2015, ICSVE is taking to the same social media that ISIS uses to entice new recruits.

“Given the prolific use of media by terrorist organizations such as ISIS to spur their global reach and propaganda, fighting ISIS and similar groups in the digital and information realm has become a major pillar of our research activities,” the website declares. “We take pride in our field-based research and evidence-based educational video materials that are carefully crafted t counter the efforts of extremist and terrorist organizations to publicize their propaganda and garner support for violence.”

This article was written by Jamie Roman. It was intended to be published on God Reports, but my editor simply didn’t publish it or explain what his intentions were with it, despite the fact that he assigned the article. After waiting weeks for a response, I decided simply to publish it here. Jamie Roman completed this assignment for extra credit at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica.

A shield of protection like Numbers 14?

A video posted by Israel News Online shows a cloud of dust and rain serving as a barrier between Israeli troops and ISIS on the other side of the Syrian border.

The miniature storm on Dec. 1 in Israel was such an unusual sight that some commentators attribute the meteorological phenomenom to a divine intervention.

“That’s God!” one comment on the Facebook post proclaims. Non-believers are chalking it up to sheer coincidence.

The video was filmed by Israeli soldiers just days after they repelled an attack by ISIS militants with mortal fire. Israel News Online refrained from speculating about the cause of the curious cloud.

“A weather phenomenon occurred at 8 a.m. Thursday on the other side of the Syrian border, in the same place where ISIS attacked Israel,” Israel News Online wrote with the video. “This strange storm of what appears to be dust, cloud and rain did not cross the border fence into Israel. It sat like a barrier between ISIS and Israel.”

Charisma News compared it to the cloud of Numbers 14, a shield against the enemies of God’s people. No news agency has produced evidence that ISIS was scrambling soldiers in the area at the time. Read the rest of the story.

You are not alone

Gehazi panicked when he woke up and saw the city surrounded by the Syrian army. It turns out the entire military was bearing down on the city to capture just one man — Gehazi’s boss, Elisha.

For his part, Elisha wasn’t worried. In fact, he already knew about the manhunt. He also knew about the angel hunt. And Elisha prayed, “Open his eyes, LORD, so that he may see.” Then the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. — 2 Kings 6:17 NIV.

When Gehazi saw that they were not alone, he probably laughed.

He laughed more at what happened next. Elisha prayed and the Syrians were “blinded.” He himself went out to them and asked them who they were looking for. When they responded that they sought Elisha, he said, “He’s not here. I’ll take you to him.” And he led the entire army to another town, where he prayed their eyes be opened so they could see their mocked haplessness. The king of Samaria asked Elisha if he should imprison them or kill him, but Elisha said, “Nah, give them something to eat and let them go.”

Are you the only one in your family or workplace that’s a Christian? Do they gang-up on you and pick on you? Do you feel alone? You are not alone. More are with you than with them. Pray for the Lord to turn your torment into triumph.

Their daring 185-mile walk to freedom

They tried living under ISIS rule in their Euphrates River-hugging city of Raqqa, but once what was paradise for them became a hell that forced them to instead flee the country, walking 185 miles and eluding military check points in danger of death.

Ibrahim, 48, and wife Turkiye, 45, arrived Feb. 9 at a refugee camp in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, with 10 children safely, according to an interview conducted by IBTimes UK.

Fear, death and carnage came on all sides in their native land. If they weren’t suffering under the oppressive ISIS militants who crucify critics, they were running from constant and indiscriminate bombardments conducted by Russians, Syrians and sometimes even the U.S., they said.

Raqqa today

ISIS maintains a tight grip on the citizenry of Raqqa, where they have set up the capital of their “caliphate,” a supposed utopia of strict Islamic law in which women must be covered from head to toe and men cannot smoke on the streets.

To pay for its war, the ISIS exacts sky-rocketing taxes of the city’s residents. And they seize children to make them into soldiers.

“They would take children like this”, said a cousin Mohammed, pointing at his 13-year-old nephew, “to teach them their religion, to brainwash them according to their beliefs. If I’d had a son and had refused to send him, they would whip me.”

The price of bread has shot up to 1,200 Syrian pounds from 40 pounds previously, Ibrahim said. Men now must grow beards, and women cannot stand next to men in the streets, even if he is a family member. Smoking is punishable by severing the index and middle finger, he added.

Taxes on fertilizer and irrigation bankrupted the family’s farming business next to the Euphrates, Ibrahim said.

Air raids designed to destroy ISIS are taking a heavy toll on the civilian population, Mohammed said.

“Daesh (another name of ISIS) would come and hide among us when the regime planes would come and bomb,” he said. “There is no proper targeting. To kill one ISIS person, they will kill 30 civilians. What the Daesh would do is they would go and hide with the mothers and the children to use them as a human shield. Hundreds would die for the sake of one or two. They were all children and all elderly. They were in their 70s and 80s or younger than 10. Daesh would take over the second floor of a building while civilians hid on the first and third floors.” Read the rest of the story.

Note: I wrote this article for God Reports, so I showcase my writing here.

ISIS brainwashes boy captives to be suicide bombers

Eleven-year-old Nouri refused to train to become a suicide bomber with the other boys at an ISIS-controlled camp in northern Iraq, and due to his insubordination, the terrorists broke his legs in three places.

Ironically, the inhumane treatment saved his life. Unable to walk or run normally, he was deemed “useless” by the team of brainwashers turning kidnapped Yazidi and Kurdish kids into suicide bombers.

Because of his pronounced limp he was freed, taken home by his grandmother, and now resides in a refugee camp. His 5-year-old brother, Saman, was released with him. Repeated beatings traumatized him so badly that he asked CNN reporters if they were there to beat him. He often wakes up screaming from nightmares.

The parents of both boys remain in captivity.

“They asked us to come with them for the training,” Nouri said. “At first we refused to go because we were afraid. They asked me to go to the mountain and I refused again, then they broke my leg. That saved me. The other children were taken by force.”

The use of captive children to perform suicide missions is not only the latest evidence of ISIS savagery. It is also the most terrifying.

That’s because when the boys are sent into the No Man’s Land between ISIS soldiers and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, the Peshmerga never know if the children are truly escaping or if they will detonate a bomb.

“Many times when we are facing ISIS, we see the children at the front line and they’re wearing explosive vests. They are brainwashed,” said Aziz Abdullah Hadur, a Peshmerga commander. “When they make it through our lines they kill our fighters. It’s an unbelievably hard decision. You don’t know what to do because if you don’t kill them they’ll kill you.” Read the rest of the story: crimes of ISIS.

This article was written by Cindy Gutierrez. I was her editor and teacher at the Lighthouse Christian Academy journalism class. It is a Santa Monica Christian high school. Cindy is a senior. The fall semester, in which she took the class, just ended.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern need to live

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are unwittingly betraying their childhood friend, Hamlet, and playing into the hands of the usurper Claudius, who by killing Hamlet’s father and marrying Hamlet’s mother seized the throne of Denmark. Hamlet appeals to them to remain loyal to him, but since they’re sycophants, they fawn over the king and don’t perceive his treachery.

So Hamlet kills them summarily.

They were — unknowingly — escorting Hamlet to his death in England. Hamlet opens the letter sealing his fate while his friends sleep on the boat from Denmark. Needless to say, Hamlet doesn’t appreciate them being his conduit to death (the letter orders England, a vassal state in the play, to execute Hamlet). So Hamlet rewrites and reseals the letter changing the object of execution to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet himself changes ship and boards a pirates’ vessel and heads back to Denmark while his comrades continue onward to their death in England.

Was Hamlet wrong to kill his buddies? Shakespeare leaves his audience with the sense that they got what they deserved.

But where Shakespeare leaves his audience happy with their death, Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead picks up their cause. Because they acted unknowingly, they deserved life.

Of course Stoppard is describing his existential cosmovision, a bleak view that life is meaningless, death inevitable and destiny cruel. I don’t share his vacuum view of leadership, but I heartily applaud his taking up the cause of the anonymous, the defenseless, the voiceless.

Every life is valuable. None should be disposed of because of convenience. One person cannot assign importance — or lack thereof — to another human being. God has instilled incalculable value to every human being.

Fear or faith?

Perfect love casts out fear — 1 John 4:18.

Running away from evangelism is what has made things run amok in the world. We Christians have abdicated our responsibility for too long. We can blame ourselves, not the politicians, for the problems of the world. Now we should not run to them looking for solutions that only we can provide.

Love is a choice. Fear is a knee-jerk reaction. We must choose to follow the Spirit lest we follow the flesh. The first Christians risked being thrown into the arena to be eaten by starved savage animals. We cannot expect a riskless Christianity. There is no drone Christianity where we direct evangelism from afar without putting boots on the ground. We haven’t wanted to go to the souls; now we don’t want the souls to come to us.

The days of isolationism are over, like it or not.

Can’t we help Syrians?

Four-year-old Adi Hudea mistook a photographer’s camera for a gun and immediately surrendered. Her childhood has been stolen by the horrors of war. Her innocence marred by daily scenes of death. She doesn’t know how to play, only to fear for her life.

We must help the Syrians. This, to me, trumps concerns about terrorists sneaking into our borders. The love of Christ must overpower fear for our own well-being, convenience and personal luxury. Christians must not be reactionary but pro-active with prayer, evangelism and, above all, the love of God towards hurting millions around the world.

This sweet but terrified girl was photographed by Turkish photographer Osman Sagirli last December at a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border.

US Justice Department persecutes Christian attorney who helps Iraqi immigrants

By Chad Dou

He helped Christian Assyrians obtain legal status in the U.S., but now a Chicago lawyer is being charged by the Justice Department with falsifying information on asylum applications.

Robert DeKelaita, 52, says he’s eager to stand trial and dismiss the “absurd” charges, and the 1,000 or so immigrants he has helped are rallying behind him. Some go so far as to accuse the current administration of being hostile toward Christians while being friendly to Muslims.

“I am very much looking forward to getting my trial on, and I believe I will be vindicated and people will see that the DOJ is not acting properly,” said DeKelaita, who immigrated from Iraq with his family when he was 11 years old.

Because he escaped religious persecution himself, it was natural for DeKelaita to help fellow believers from the Middle East. But now his efforts have drawn the ire of the Justice Department, which charged him with doctoring asylum applications of 12 clients.

For Mimi Odicho of Chicago, such allegations against the lawyer who helped her are an outrage. “My sister and her three young children are among the Assyrian hostages in Syria. We don’t even know if they’re still alive,” she told WorldNetDaily (WND). “Instead of trying to help save them – save these innocent people – the U.S. government is trying to take down a man who has been our people’s only hope for years.

“Robert is our hero,” Odicho said. “He represented me in my asylum claim when I didn’t have any way to pay him except with a ‘thanks.’ I am forever indebted to him. He was a light at the end of a very long and horrid immigration tunnel for me and for many others.”

While DeKelaita has hit roadblocks helping Christian immigrants, Muslim refugees from the Syrian civil war represent the largest portion of a U.S. resettlement program that House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, has called a “jihadist pipeline” into America. Some estimate that 95% of new legalized immigrants to the U.S. are Muslim.

In September of 2014, DeKelaita and his translator were arrested when federal agents raided his office in Chicago. The pair were indicted for allegedly charging fees to submit false information and for coaching immigrants how to lie to the Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The indictment accuses DeKelaita of writing or creating “false asylum statements detailing non-existent accounts of purported religious persecution, including fictitious accounts of rape and murder, and attached these statements to the [CIS] Form I-589 he submitted on behalf of his clients,” CNS News reported.

After pleading not guilty in federal court to the charges, the pair were released on their own recognizance. For each count, he faces up to 10 years of imprisonment and $250,000 in fines.

Christians in the region between Iraq and Syrian have suffered increased persecution with the advent of the Islamic State. Men are executed while women and girls are forced into sex slavery. Hundreds of thousands have fled and are refugees.

A video about the indictment argues that federal authorities extracted false confessions out of previous DeKelaita clients by intimidating them during hours-long interrogations in which they didn’t inform them of their rights.

As the trial date approached, many of those testimonies were dropped as unreliable, and the trial was postponed from May to April of next year in an attempt to get better evidence, the video explains.

Bishop Mar Gewargis Younan of the Ancient Church of the East, now presiding in the Chicago area, said the Assyrian Christains will give unflagging support to DeKelaita.

“His entire career has been aimed at giving back – to the church, to his heritage, to his people,” Mar Gewargis said to WND. “I can say with confidence that every parishioner in our church has either themselves been represented by Mr. DeKelaita, or has a relative that was represented by him. When the charges were filed, the community was in outrage and disbelief – and rightfully so.

“There is not a single Assyrian family anywhere in Iraq or Syria that has not been directly impacted by religious persecution,” he added. “The manner in which Mr. DeKelaita’s case has been approached seemingly moves to challenge this true. We are proud of Mr. DeKelaita’s achievements and will continue to support him.”

Editor’s Note: Chad completed this article as an assignment (I’m the teacher) for an English class at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica. Originally, it was published on GodReports.com but then it was taken down. Here it is in its entirety.

He was just a tyke at Lighthouse when I taught there. Now he’s a hero.

As a scout for the U.S. Marines 4th Light Armored Battalion, Tyler Smith is no stranger to weapons. But now in Iraq on a dangerous mission near the Islamic State war, the Santa Monica resident is completely unarmed.

Tyler, who studied and worked in Santa Monica, is currently deployed in Iraq with Operation Soul Shepherd helping refugees. He and seven other men as part of an advance team are setting up a safehouse for women and girls who have been raped by ISIS jihadists.

“I couldn’t let myself sit at home doing nothing while people here were suffering so immensely,” said Tyler. “I CAN help, so there’s no reason not to. I’m just a man trying to do the right thing. I’m not a hero.”

Not everyone agrees with his self-effacing.

“Every one of these guys are heroes,” said Paul Neier, founder of Mississippi-based non-profit that fights human-trafficking. “They made made a choice to go into harm’s way. The craziest thing about this is they are in the belly of the beast. They have no weapons to defend themselves.”

Read the rest of the article.

ISIS stealing, selling body parts

[Editor’s note: Forgive me for posting such disturbing news. This blog has generally been a place for uplifting devotionals. I post this because it is my reporting on GodReports.com and because I believe exposing evil and raising awareness is part of the solution.]

Pic: Daily Mail

As a means to finance their murderous “caliphate,” the Islamic State is harvesting organs to sell on the black market in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, according to the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations.

Mohamed Alhakim said his country has found dozens of bodies with surgical incisions and missing body parts in shallow mass graves in recent weeks outside Mosul, where ISIS remains in power, the UK Daily Mail reports.

“We have bodies. Come and examine them,” says Alhakim, who made the allegations before the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. “It is clear they are missing certain parts.”

Furthermore, dozens of doctors in Mosul have been executed in Mosul for refusing to perform organ harvesting, he says.

Read the rest of the article: click here.

An inside view of the IS (more of my reporting on God Reports)

After visiting Islamic State-occupied territory at great risk, a German journalist called the extremist organization a “movement with the power of a nuclear bomb” after returning home last week.

Jurgen Todenhoefer, a 74-year-old German journalist, was given unprecedented access to the Islamic State and returned to Munich after spending 10 days with the terrorist group in the areas the group control in Iraq and Syria.

They are “the most brutal and most dangerous enemy I have ever seen in my life,” Todenhoefer said, as part of a series of interviews broadcast on the BBC and CNN.

Born out of the Syrian rebel movement, IS catapulted into international attention, seizing major cities in Iraq last June and beheading James Foley and other westerners whose governments refuse to negotiate a ransom. The group consists mostly of Sunni Muslims, many of whom aided Saddam Hussein’s cruel regime, and is growing daily by Muslims drawn to radicalism from all parts of the world.

IS fighters were surprisingly confident, Todenhoefer said.

“We will conquer Europe one day,” one fighter told him. “It is not a question of IF we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain. For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines. Our expansion will be perpetual. And the Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons. And those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.” To read the rest of the article, click here: Christian world news.