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Hold Those Christmas Cards to Our Troops!

Andy’s excellent article on Saturday argued, among other things, the absurdity of U.S. military efforts to follow Islamic law in our wars in the Muslim world. It turns out that the civilian branch of...

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Serial Genocide in Sudan

Sudan’s president, Gen. Omar al-Bashir -- an indicted war criminal -- is now ferociously targeting the 1 million Nuba and various other peoples of oil-rich Southern Kordofan. Though this area sided...

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The Administration Takes on ‘Islamophobia’

An unprecedented collaboration between the Obama administration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, formerly called the Organization of the Islamic Conference) to combat “Islamophobia”...

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No Explicit Right to Vote for Saudi Women

Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah issued a vaguely worded decree about women’s political rights that has been widely reported as meaning that women have been given the right to vote in...

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Iran: Execution for Apostasy Seems Imminent

The American interfaith delegation -- Catholic cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Episcopal bishop John Bryson Chane, and Council on American Islamic Relations director Nihad Awad -- who made headlines when...

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For Saudi Women, One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

On the heels of an edict allowing women to “participate” in elections to powerless municipal councils and to be appointed to a toothless Shura council, today Saudi Arabia has sentenced a woman,...

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More on the Iranian Pastor

Today, evangelical Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani refused to recant his Christian faith before a court in Iran for the third time. He will be brought to the court again for this purpose tomorrow, for the...

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Yousef Nadarkhani Needs International Support

Today, Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani stood before an Iranian court for the final time and resisted its demands that he recant his Christian faith. One week after the Catholic News Agency reported that a...

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Iran Switches Charges Against Pastor for the Second Time

Iran’s government is distributing various reports about the legal status of Christian pastor Yousef (also spelled Yousof and Youcef) Nadarkhani. The case has attracted high-level Western protests,...

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Will the Senate Quietly Kill the U.S. Commission on International Religious...

Religious persecution around the world threatens many minority groups -- Egyptian Copts, Pakistani Ahmadiyas, Saudi Ismaili Shiites, Baha’is in Iran, and Chinese Sunni Uighurs, Catholics, and Tibetan...

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The Lord's Resistance Army: An Abomination in Africa

For the past quarter of a century, 50-year-old Ugandan madman Joseph Kony -- who claims to have channeled the spirit of one of Idi Amin’s generals -- has led the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),...

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How Do Iraq's Christians Feel about the Troop Pull-Out?

This good piece of reporting by the National Catholic Register gives a glimpse into the thoughts and fears of Iraq’s beleaguered Christian minority now that President Obama has announced the imminent...

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What about Egypt?

Despite repeated CNN live footage of Cairo’s Tahrir Square just before commercial breaks, Egypt never came up in the debate. Heavy bloodshed as the military clings to power and/or Islamist rule under...

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Egypt's Islamist Tsunami

It turns out my colleague Sam Tadros was right on the mark in his prognostication of the first phase of the Egyptian parliamentary elections. On Tuesday, he predicted:The question is not whether the...

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Another Christian Martyred in Pakistan

Another Christian in Pakistan has been murdered, and the local Catholic Church is calling her a “martyr of the faith.”The 18-year-old Amariah Masih (also reported as Mariah Manisha), a Catholic girl...

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D.C. Islamophobia Conference Was a Bad Idea

Yesterday marked the opening of the international conference announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a high-level meeting on Islamophobia that she co-chaired, held last July in Istanbul and...

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Nigeria’s Catholic Bishops Appeal for Help Against Religious Cleansing

In its latest move to effect religious cleansing in Africa’s largest country, Boko Haram --- the Nigerian Islamist movement that claimed responsibility for the deadly Christmas Day bombings of a...

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Defend Threatened Muslim Moderates: Save Husain Haqqani

Husain Haqqani may soon be put on trial for his life in his native Pakistan. That country’s ambassador to the United States until last November, he now faces allegations of treason in the so-called...

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali Breaks the Media Silence on Anti-Christian Persecution

Best-selling author, film director, women’s-rights advocate, former Dutch parliamentarian, Islamist death-threat survivor, refugee from a Somalian forced marriage, and a fierce champion of individual...

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Persecuted for Praying to God in Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia --- where religious persecution is a virtue and tolerance, a vice--- praying as a Christian, even in the privacy of a home, is treated as a felony offence. And, notwithstanding the...

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The Long Arm of Saudi Blasphemy Laws

Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old columnist, stands accused of blasphemy in his homeland of Saudi Arabia for tweets he posted on Islam’s prophet Mohammed that many of his countrymen find insulting to...

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Bibles that Translate “The Father” as “Allah”

The most astonishing example of the global inroads being made by Muslim blasphemy codes may well be found in a deepening controversy over the Bible translations for many Muslim cultures by Wycliffe,...

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Pakistan’s Honorable Shahbaz Bhatti, Murdered with Impunity One Year Ago

Today, March 2, is the one-year anniversary of the murder in Pakistan of 42-year-old Shahbaz Bhatti. Still no one has been charged with the crime, much less tried and held accountable.On March 2, 2011,...

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States that Abuse Women

In his March 3 New York Times column, entitled “When States Abuse Women,” Nicholas Kristof condemns a new Texas law because it requires women who seek abortions in the state, first, to have an...

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Invisible Children’s Message Is Now Seen

The video “Kony 2012” went viral on YouTube on March 5, and has been watched over 32 million times so far. Made by three young filmmakers with the Invisible Children organization, the video’s focus is...

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I Take Back My Clooney Criticism

I take back what I wrote about George Clooney and Sudan on NRO six years ago.This morning, Clooney and other activists got themselves arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington,...

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The World’s Worst Religious Persecutors

Today, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (Uscirf) released its 14th annual report, which it is mandated to do under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The report...

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The Pope in Cuba

Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Cuba this afternoon, at a time when many Cubans are desperate to be rid of the 53-year-old Castro dictatorship. Some suggest that this should be the “Cuban Spring.” One...

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The Pope in Revolution Square

In Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution today, Pope Benedict gave a powerful sermon reflecting on truth, freedom, faith, and reason, and their meaning for Cuba, as Kathryn mentioned. These are recurrent...

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The Salafi War on Christians and U.S. Indifference

In recent years, we've begun to brace ourselves for news of bombings, burnings, and other attacks on churches full of Christian worshipers on religious holy days -- for example, in Nigeria, Egypt,...

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Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and the President’s New Initiative

Yesterday, at a commemorative event at the Holocaust Museum here in Washington, President Obama announced a new initiative -- the creation of a committee to be named the “Atrocities Prevention Board.”...

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Re: The Real War on Women

Honor killings are at the heart of the real war on women, as Lee Habeeb critically reminds us. But they are not a problem only in Turkey, Pakistan, and other Muslim-majority countries. The practice is...

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Re: Can Mideast Christians Survive?

Hudson Institute's round-table discussion on “Persecuted Christians and Other Religious Minorities in the New Middle East: Formulating an Effective U.S. Policy Response,” described by Mark Tooley, was...

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China: Caesar Demanding What Is God’s

As widely reported, Catholic Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin has not been publicly seen since July 7, the day he was ordained auxiliary bishop of Shanghai and the day when he dissented from state religious...

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Why the U.S. Must Oppose Blasphemy Laws -- Not Just Their Abuse

Today’s New York Times and Washington Post shed rare light on the latest gross injustices that result from Pakistan’s blasphemy law. They report on yesterday’s arrest of Rimsha Masih, an 11- or...

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Re: Egyptian Jihadists Flocking to Syria?

This morning’s papers are reporting that the U.S. government is poised to forgive Egypt $1 billion out of the $3.2 billion in debt it owes the American taxpayer. This follows the brazen public...

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Two Christians Freed; Two Peoples Held Captive

Last Saturday brought rare good news on the international religious-freedom front. Two high-profile Christian prisoners who had been severely persecuted under their countries' Muslim apostasy and...

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U.S. Embassy Favors Religious Feelings over Free Speech, Attacked Anyway

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo has posted on its homepage a special message for 9/11 today. Its only purpose is to condemn what they call “religious incitement.” While calling for religious harmony is...

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Thwarting Religious Cleansing in the Muslim World

Physicist Mohammad Abdus Salam was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim to win a Nobel prize in science. His discoveries continue to dazzle the world as demonstrated by the verification last summer...

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Major Publishers Protest Saudi Textbook Content

An appeal to the government of Saudi Arabia to stop publishing hate-filled textbooks was issued today by seven current and former heads of major American publishing houses. Leading it was Robert...

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America Again Submits to the Istanbul Process

Round three of the “Istanbul Process” opens today, December 3, and runs through Wednesday, at Canada House, in London, hosted by the U.K. and Canada. The Istanbul Process is Secretary of State Hillary...

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Religious Freedom: Front and Center on Human Rights Day

Today is International Human Rights Day. On December 10, 1948, the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights was adopted, with significant American influence, thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt and others. Senator...

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The Saudis’ PR ‘Roads’ Show

Even before the “Arab spring” revolts -- indeed, ever since the 9/11 attacks on American soil by mostly Saudi terrorists -- the Saudi royal family has assiduously waged a public-relations campaign to...

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Focusing on Global Religious Persecution: ‘Not to Act Is to Act’

The growing severity of religious persecution against Christians internationally has been observed over the past year by sources as diverse as the Pew Research Center, The Economist, Newsweek,...

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Very, Very Quiet Diplomacy on Religious Freedom

The State Department's very quiet, if not silent, response to the imprisonment and abuse of an American citizen now on trial for his Christian faith in Iran, described by David French on the Corner, is...

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The Silent Exodus of Syria’s Christians

In Syria’s rebellion, no religious or ethnic group has been spared horrific levels of loss and suffering, but its 2,000-year-old Christian minority is now facing a distinct persecution. Under the cover...

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Tanzania Too: Christians Threatened with Islamist Violence on Easter

Tanzania is the latest in a growing number of African countries to be struggling with escalating Islamist terror. In this country of 45 million people, over 60 percent of whom are Christian, church...

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Re: Tanzania Too

On Monday, I reported that a Protestant pastor had been killed on February 11 in Tanzania, a week before the Catholic priest Father Evarist Mushi was shot dead outside Zanzibar’s St. Joseph’s Cathedral...

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Persecution and the Pope

Pope Francis I should be a strong defender of persecuted religious believers of all faiths. The world is in dire need of such leadership.Religious persecution is the gravest human-rights abuse of our...

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Egypt’s Copts Need Protection: What’s Morsi Waiting For?

Yesterday from Egypt, Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II delivered an unprecedented condemnation of the escalating religious attacks there against Coptic Christians: “The church has been a national...

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