I’ve received the following grim report on the persecution of Christians in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which I’m passing on to you. It’s been sent to many news outlets and bloggers, but I haven’t yet seen it published.
According to a good Iranian source, 601 Christians–converts all–have been arrested in the past 130 days. It’s a big campaign.
Here you go.
I have attached the photos and names of Iranian Christians who were arrested on Christmas and I am asking that you please publish them. It is important that their names and faces appear across our websites.
According to Elam Ministries, “in the early morning hours after Christmas day, the Iranian government arrested 25 Christians in Tehran and other locations. They also planned to detain sixteen others, but were unable to locate them. There are also unconfirmed reports that the authorities have arrested over 50 other Christians. According to BBC Persian, the Governor of Tehran has vowed to arrest more evangelical Christians.
One of those detained was able to make a call to friends from an unknown location on the morning of the arrests, leaving this message -
“Unfortunately early this morning the authorities came to our homes. They arrested us and many other believers. I want to ask you to pray for us. We are sure God will never leave us or forsake us. God bless you. Sorry for giving you bad news over Christmas, but I believe God will do something for us.”
Those who received the voice message were impressed by the caller’s courage and calmness.
Armed, plain-clothes, special security officers forcefully entered the homes of Christians while they were asleep, and verbally and physically abused them. They were handcuffed and taken for interrogation. Among those arrested were five married couples. One couple was separated from their two-year old baby. Another couple was also forced to leave their baby that the mother was breast feeding. A number of single young women were also among those taken.
Another sixteen Christians would have been arrested, but were not at home. The security forces broke into at least five such homes, ransacking them, taking personal possessions, changing the locks and placing a government seal on the door. Family members of these Christians have been called by the authorities and threatened and harassed. They were instructed to tell the Christians to surrender themselves.
After many hours of interrogation, eleven of the detained were released. The other fourteen are still in prison. There has been no contact from eight of the arrested. Six have been able to make a very short call to their families. In one of the brief calls, one of the arrested complained that they are being subjected to sleep deprivation.
None of them has been granted any legal representation. No charges have been made, though it is clear that they were arrested for their active Christian faith.There has been a gross lack of due process. The government authorities have not provided any written documents as to the reason for the arrests, any record of the items confiscated, and family members are not allowed to visit the detained.
The Elam Team
It needs to be said that, for the most part, only a specific kind of Christian is targeted for arrest and those are ones who have converted from Islam. And, by the way, this is not limited to only the Christian converts. It is also true for Zoroastrian and Bahaii converts. They are called “Mortads”, which is the word for an apostate. If that specifity of target were not true then all the indigenous Armenians, of which Iran has many, would also be arrested en masse. The prophet of Islam, in a moment of brilliant legal epiphany, mandated the death penalty for such apostates. It is faith by fiat not by free choice. Of course Tommy Torquemada indulged in similar behavior requiring that members of the Sephardium convert to Christianity under the penalty of death. The clerics are in good historical company with Tommy and Dolphi.
Horseradish, you are right. Armenian and other traditional churches and christians enjoy a very good traitment in iran.
those beeing persecuted are never from the so called eastern churches. they mostly belong to american evangelical missionarie churches.
i think iran is doing a good job, cleaning the country from this artificial wannabe christians.
These wannabe artificial Christians are those who have seen Islam for what it is and fully aware of the punishment levied on apostates courageously gone forward with their conversion. This is an action that I would fear if I were living in that hell hole. In fact, probably a majority would also be afraid to attempt. So, these wannabe artficial Christians are members of the A list of courage. And anyone condemning just courage is a coward in my book.
APPLAUSE!
Michael: I’m sorry, but I got confused. Many parts of this story appear to be a recap of the Elian Gonzalez saga.
Oh, yeah, forgot; that wasn’t Christmas, that was Easter and a different country.
For the persecuted of the world, no matter what their faith:
“Arise, O Lord, and let Thy enemies by scattered and let them that hate Thee flee from before Thy Face!”
We can gain solace from this portion of a Christmas carol, “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep, God is not dead, nor doth he sleep. The strong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, goodwill to men”.
Those under persecution for adhering to the Christian faith tradition, I have this message: You are not alone. There are people in better off situations which stand with you. I am honoured to be one of those in lands that are better off.
This is HARAM! HARAM! The righteous people are in jail in Iran and the Shaitans have the power. It is the fate of the Iranian nation to suffer. Pasdars are the offenders of Iran and Islam not the defenders. All I hear is bad news from Iran. That dirty regime almost COLLAPSED in the Summer of 2009 but MOUSAVI DROPPED THE FRICKIN BALL and President Obama did not give any moral support to the Iranian freedom seekers. SHAME!
Bless you for publishing this, Mr. Ledeen. Christians and Jews are increasingly under persecution in areas where they have not experienced it for some time. But Islamists don’t stop with persecuting Jews and Christians: their most frequent targets are their fellow Muslims.
It won’t be until Islamism is defeated as a unifying globalist idea that this comes to an end. But that will happen.
The unidentified caller cited in the story said, “We are sure God will never leave us or forsake us.” Joshua 1:5 (and several similar verses from other books). Many Christians the world over are praying for them.
I am praying for them too, but I think my prayers would be more likely to help if my government worked to bring down the Iranian regime, and I wish the Christian community–like most others–were more outspoken about it.
What has always baffled me is how they could be called apostate. If you consider for a moment that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the God of Abraham, and that a person converting from one practice to another does not change their faith in that very same God, they only change in their practice of worship, it is not really abandoning anything.
Consider for a moment that God might make Himself known to people in many different ways. He communicates His word to various peoples in ways they can understand and relate to. And so you have the very same God speaking the very same message in different ways to different people. Is God upset that people might choose to relate more closely to one message than the other? For some reason I don’t think so. It is only men who are upset about that. One many might experience another man’s choice to worship in a different way as some invalidation of their own choice and so seek to blot out the other way of worship. But that is a narrow vision and a narrow mind. God has given all those ways or worship to His people. He is reaching us through several different ways, whichever way resonates with us, I believe doesn’t matter. As long as we believe there is but one God, the God of Abraham, we are all playing from the same songbook.