By Greg Nyquist, WorldNetDaily.com

The twentieth century will go down in history, not merely as the bloodiest and most genocidal of all centuries, but also as the century in which Western Civilization suffered its greatest setbacks since the rise of Islam in the seventh century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the West more or less controlled the entire world. By the 1960s, most of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe had fallen out of the orbit of the West, devoured in large part by the two most formidable anti-Western creeds, Communism and Islam.

One of the least appreciated consequences of this transformation is the resumption of a type of persecution that would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago: namely, the persecutions of Christians. WorldNet magazine's February 2000 edition Case in point: Mary, a young Egyptian girl who grew up as a Coptic Christian. When she was 18 years old, a group of radicals from the "Gamat Islamiya" kidnapped and raped Mary, forcing her to convert to Islam. Her captors poured sulfuric acid on her wrist in order to remove a tattooed cross, and threatened to throw the acid in her face if she didn't consent to wear the traditional Islamic veil. When Mary's father went to the Cairo police, he was told to forget his daughter and was ordered to sign a document pledging that he would cease all efforts to recover her. Mary eventually escaped her captors and received assistance from the clandestine group "Servants of the Cross," which facilitated Mary's re-conversion to Christianity. According to one of the representatives of the organization, there have been in recent years anywhere between 7,000 and 10,000 forced conversions to Islam in Egypt.

By Muslim standards, Egypt is almost moderate. No place in the world are Christians more brutally persecuted than in Sudan, Africa's largest country. In 1989, militant Islamic military officers seized power over the democratically elected government and declared a virtual jihad against southern Sudanese "infidels" -- which is to say, against Christians and animists. A scorched-earth policy was adopted in southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, scene of some the most horrifying religious persecution since the holocaust. Whole villages have been bombed, burned and looted. Many inhabitants have been relocated into concentration camps where they have been starved until they agreed to convert to Islam. Christians have been subject to torture, imprisonment and assassination. Enslavement, rape, deprivation of water and systematic starvation are also commonplace. As a result of these policies, more people in Sudan have been murdered than in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda combined.

Or take the plight of Christians in China. In recent years, the Chinese government has made a special effort to crack down on house churches. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, between February and June 1996, "police have destroyed at least fifteen thousand unregistered temples, churches and tombs." Believers can be arrested and tortured merely for holding unauthorized prayer meetings or distributing Bibles without state approval. Reports have surfaced of Chinese women being hung by their thumbs with wires and beaten with heavy rods, denied food and water and shocked with electric probes. Religious leaders are fined, thrown into prison, tortured and sent to "education through labor" concentration camps.

It gets worse. Even in the ostensibly "democratic" Russia it appears that the persecution of non-Orthodox Christians may soon begin to parallel the persecution of Christians under the Soviet regime. On Sept. 26, 1997, President Yeltsin signed a new anti-religious law, which, in effect, outlaws every religious organization that has appeared in Russia during the last 15 years and subjects them to surveillance by the secret police. Within weeks after Yeltsin signed the anti-religion law, police began breaking up Catholic and Protestant gatherings. "Inquiries, interrogations, police raids and groundless church closures will likely once again become commonplace in Russia," warned Rev. Steven L. Snyder, president of International Christian Concern.

Last August, police and security agents raided the Word of Life Church in Magadan, a city in far Eastern Russia, near Siberia. Church members were taken away for interrogation in the middle of the night. They were stripped of their jewelry, their fingernails and pockets were slit, and they were threatened with the loss of their homes and possessions. "This persecution is no different from those which were done under the Communist regime," stated Nickolay Voskoboynikov, the church's pastor. Michael Horowitz, an activist on behalf of persecuted Christians around the world, has warned that unless a serious effort is made to confront the horrors of the persecution of Christians and put a stop to them, Christians are likely to become "the Jews of the twenty-first century, the scapegoats of choice of the world's thug regimes.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/20000120_xex_the_lions_ba.shtml