Tag Archives: Christian Persecution

Christian widow survives Islamic State for two years of fear

Zarifa Badoos Daddo (C), 77, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Erbil, Iraq. Zarifa was reunited with her family on Sunday after Iraqi forces drove Islamic State from the town of Qaraqosh, southeast of Mosul.

By Stephen Kalin

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – An elderly Christian widow who survived two years of Islamic State rule over her northern Iraqi town said the jihadists threatened to kill her, forced her to spit on a crucifix and made her stamp on an image of the Virgin Mary.

Zarifa Badoos Daddo, 77, was reunited with her family on Sunday after Iraqi forces drove Islamic State from Qaraqosh as they advanced on Mosul, the militants’ last major urban bastion in the country. The forces found her sheltering in a house they thought was abandoned or booby-trapped with explosives.

Most residents of Qaraqosh – Iraq’s largest Christian town – had fled toward the country’s autonomous Kurdish region more than two years ago as the jihadists approached, but Daddo stayed on with another elderly woman.

Her relatives had long feared she was dead.

Islamic State singled out religious minorities in northern Iraq, including Christians and Yazidis, for murder and eviction after declaring a caliphate in 2014 over territory they captured there and in neighboring Syria. Their seizure of Mosul and surrounding towns effectively drove Christians from the area for the first time in two millennia.

Daddo, who is hard of hearing, told Reuters on Sunday that the militants had not physically hurt her, but had intimidated and robbed her, made her desecrate her religion and tried to force her to convert to Islam.

“They told me to spit on the crucifix. I was crying inside but I couldn’t show it,” she said at a relative’s home in the Kurdish capital Erbil, an hour’s drive from Qaraqosh.

Then the jihadists demanded she stamp on an image of the Virgin Mary that she kept at home. “I said (to myself), ‘Oh Mariam, I will step on you but you know I don’t mean it’.”

Daddo, whose husband died in 2014, was reunited with her brother and other relatives in Erbil on Sunday. Her jubilant family slaughtered a lamb to celebrate what they consider the miracle of her survival.

The widow, with bushy gray eyebrows, decaying teeth, and a cross tattooed on the back of her wrist, sat with relatives who wept and applauded as she recounted her most harrowing encounters. She spoke in a mix of Arabic and Syriac, an ancient dialect of the Aramaic language which Jesus spoke.

Her niece said the family had lost touch with her about 18 months ago when Islamic State clamped down on telephones in areas under their control.

“We didn’t know anything about her. Anything could have happened.”

‘WHOLE WORLD IS HAPPY’

Most of Iraq’s Christian population is based in the north, around Mosul, which is one of the world’s oldest centers of Christianity, dating back to the first century AD.

A quarter of a century ago there were well over a million Christians in Iraq but their numbers dwindled during the 1990s as the country faced war and sanctions, and the exodus accelerated after waves of attacks on Christians in the sectarian violence following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Qaraqosh, about 20 km (13 miles) southeast of Mosul, was a Christian town of about 45,000 people before Islamic State swept across the region.

Daddo was sleeping in her garden when the jihadists entered the town in August 2014 and issued an ultimatum: pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword.

She said she too had wanted to leave the town, but eventually lost hope. “I cried because I wondered where I would go,” she said. “There was nobody left in Qaraqosh. We had no neighbors, nobody. They all left.”

Islamic State provided her with enough food to survive, she said, but they also made surprise visits to the house which left her terrified.

“We were two women living by ourselves. They would come at night, sometimes they would come at four in the morning, so we were scared,” said Daddo, wearing a black cloak that covered her hair and a purple sash across her chest.

“They would say, ‘Sister don’t be scared, we are your brothers. You are one of us now.'”

The militants took all the valuables from her house. When she assured them there was nothing left for them to take, they threatened her: “They came back another day and said, ‘If you don’t give us your money, we will empty this machine gun in your chest.'”

Islamic State repeatedly tried to convert Daddo to Islam. At first, she argued. “I tried to tell them, ‘What is the difference between a Muslim and a Christian? We all worship God’.”

“My heart would race when they tried to get me to convert. They would try to get me to (say the Muslim declaration of faith). I told them I didn’t know how to say it, and I said it in reverse.”

Eventually, though, Daddo yielded: “I would say what they wanted. My life is dear to me so I said what I had to.”

Islamic State was driven out of Qaraqosh nine days ago. On Sunday, in a charred church, the Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mosul celebrated mass in the town for the first time since its recapture.

Back in Erbil, perched on a couch under an image of the Last Supper, Daddo said she was relieved to be back with family and friends. “What do you expect? Wouldn’t you be happy? Now the whole world is happy.”

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Pravin Char)

Egypt Muslims attack Christian woman, burn houses after affair rumor

CAIRO (Reuters) – Hundreds of Muslims have set fire to homes of Christians in southern Egypt and stripped a 70-year-old woman naked after rumors her Christian son had an affair with a Muslim woman, the local church and witnesses said.

The Christian man fled with his wife and children on May 19, said Ishak Ibrahim at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. His parents went to the police, fearing for their lives.

The next day, around 300 Muslim men set fire to and looted their house in the southern province of Minya and stripped the mother naked out on the street. They also set fire to and looted six other houses, eyewitnesses told Reuters.

“They burned the house and went in and dragged me out, threw me in front of the house and ripped my clothes. I was just as my mother gave birth to me and was screaming and crying,” the woman, who requested anonymity, told Reuters.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi condemned the attack in a statement on Thursday and ordered authorities to bring those behind it to justice. He also ordered local authorities and the military to rebuild all damaged properties within a month at state expense.

Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II called for calm and restraint in a statement on Thursday. He said he was pursuing the matter with Egyptian officials and that he had spoken to the woman and all those whose homes were attacked.

The woman accuses three Muslim men of stripping her and dragging her in front of her house, her lawyer Ehab Ramzi told Reuters.

Security sources said police arrested five men in connection with the incident and the public prosecutor had ordered their detention and the arrest of 18 others.

Ten members of parliament put forward a motion to cross-examine Interior Minister Magdi Abdel Ghaffar over the incident.

Orthodox Copts, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people, are the Middle East’s biggest Christian community. They have long complained of discrimination under successive Egyptian leaders.

(Reporting by Mohamed Abdellah and Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Ali Abdelaty; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Boko Haram Targets Civilians

A member of a civilian vigilante group holds a hunting rifle while a woman pumps water

KERAWA, Cameroon (Reuters) – Adama Simila wears a knife tied to his belt by a piece of rope, his only protection against Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist insurgents who have repeatedly targeted his home town in remote northern Cameroon.

While the threat once came from heavily armed, battle-hardened jihadists crossing from neighboring Nigeria, today Simila knows he is more likely to die at the hands of a teenage girl strapped with explosives.

“We’re here to look out for suicide bombers,” said the 31-year-old, a member of a local civilian defense force in the town of Kerawa.

After watching its influence spread during a six-year campaign that has killed around 15,000 people according to the U.S. military, Nigeria has now united with its neighbors to stamp out Boko Haram.

A regional offensive last year drove the insurgents from most of their traditional strongholds, denying them their dream of an Islamic emirate in northeastern Nigeria. An 8,700-strong regional force of troops from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria is seeking to finish the job.

Now, increasingly on the back foot, Boko Haram is retaliating with a deadly guerrilla campaign against civilians, and ordinary people like Simila have become the last line of defense.

“I’m not scared. They are people, we are also people. We must die to live,” said Simila, who was at the Kerawa market in September when two girls detonated themselves, killing 19 people and injuring 143 others. A nearly identical bombing at the same market followed in January.

Outside Nigeria, Cameroon has been hardest hit by Boko Haram, which now operates out of bases in the Mandara Mountains, Sambisa Forest and Lake Chad — areas straddling the borders between Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad and Niger.

Since August 2014, the sect has carried out 336 attacks in Cameroon, according to the Cameroonian army, which has lost 57 of its own men while defending the north.

Of 34 recorded suicide bombings killing 174 people, 80 percent were carried out by girls and young women aged 14 to 24 years.

Girls abused as sex slaves by the group are psychologically damaged and therefore more vulnerable, the army says. Boko Haram also uses girls because they are thought less likely to arouse suspicion, although that may be changing now.

“The goal now is to stop Boko Haram incursions into villages, stop them from planting IEDs (home-made bombs), and stop suicide bombings,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Tetcha, a senior officer in the army’s operation against Boko Haram.

Cameroon has thrown vast resources into protecting the north.

In total nearly 10,000 of its troops are deployed against Boko Haram. The army’s Rapid Intervention Brigade (BIR), comprised of its most professional, best equipped soldiers, patrols a high-risk 400-km (250-mile) stretch of the border with Nigeria.

The U.S. military backs them with equipment, training and intelligence gathered from American drones flown out of a base in the town of Garoua. A Reuters reporter saw a small American military camp inside another BIR base in nearby Maroua.

Still, the terrain is mountainous and Boko Haram has rigged many roads with explosives designed to kill soldiers. Army officers are convinced that some fighters from Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to Islamic State last year, have been trained at IS camps in Libya.

Armed incursions by Boko Haram fighters have dropped. But the army does not have enough soldiers to deploy in every town in northern Cameroon, and suicide bombers strike regularly, often several times in a single week.

“The border is under control, but it’s still very porous,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Emile Nlaté Ebalé, head of operations and logistics for the BIR’s mission in the north.

“EVERYBODY SUFFERS IN THIS PLACE”

Faced with such an asymmetrical threat, Cameroon’s army has turned to so-called vigilance committees for help.

As the blazing midday sun beat down on Kerawa, Bouba Ahmada walked along a dry, scrub-lined creek bed, an ancient flintlock musket slung around his neck.

“Here is Cameroon, over there is Nigeria,” he said, gesturing towards the abandoned homes just across the dusty expanse. “It’s empty. Only Boko Haram stays there.”

Made up of men and boys armed with machetes, home-made rifles or bows and arrows, these self-defense forces have the blessing of the local government.

They accompany the army on patrols and intelligence gathering missions, question travelers, and denounce to the military anyone deemed suspect.

Last week they intercepted two female suicide bombers and handed them over to the army before they were able to detonate.

“We are not 100 percent dependent on this information, but this information is crucial,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Tetcha, who is not only defending Cameroon but also a growing number of Nigerians.

Close to the border sits the U.N.-run Minawao camp, home to nearly 57,000 refugees who have fled Boko Haram in Nigeria.

“Everybody suffers in this place,” said James Zapania, a 24-year-old camp resident from Gwoza, Nigeria. “We’re not worried about Boko Haram coming here, we’re worried about food.”

Refugees like Zapania often receive a chilly welcome from suspicious local villagers, many of whom view them as collaborators or even underground Boko Haram fighters.

According to one Cameroonian officer, the army has removed a number of individuals from Minawao for “activities that were not in line with the behavior of a normal refugee”.

Suspicion is everywhere. And while Boko Haram infiltrators make up only a tiny portion of fleeing refugees, many, including the Cameroonian military, fear that desperation provides fertile ground for recruitment.

“We need to act quickly. There are young people with no work who could be vulnerable. When people are hungry, they are easily approached,” said Colonel Didier Badjeck, a Cameroonian military spokesman.

(Editing by Joe Bavier and Giles Elgood)

Islamic State says killing of Christian in Bangladesh was ‘lesson to others’

DHAKA (Reuters) – Islamic State claimed responsibility for stabbing a Christian to death in Bangladesh as a “lesson to others”, an online group that monitors extremist activity said, the latest killing declared by the militant group in the Muslim-majority nation.

The South Asian country has seen a surge in Islamist violence in which liberal activists, members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups have been targeted.

The U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group said Islamic State claimed responsibility for killing Hussein Ali Sarkar in Kurigram, north of Dhaka.

The group reported on Twitter that a “security detachment” killed the “preacher” to be a “lesson to others”.

Police said the 68-year-old victim converted to Christianity from Islam in 1999 but was not a preacher.

Kurigram district police chief Tobarak Ullah said three attackers stabbed him while he was having his morning walk on Tuesday.

“They left the scene exploding crude bombs to create panic,” Ullah told Reuters by telephone.

“We have started an investigation into the murder. So far, we have not found any militant link.”

Five men were picked up for questioning, he said.

Over the last few months, Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the killings of two foreigners, attacks on members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups, but the government has denied that the militant group has a presence in Bangladesh.

Police say home-grown militant group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, thought to have been lying low since six of its top leaders were hanged in 2007, was behind the recent attacks.

Dozens of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen members have been arrested and at least five killed in shootouts since November, as security forces have stepped up a crackdown on militants seeking to make the moderate Muslim nation of 160 million a sharia-based state.

In 2005, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen set off nearly 500 bombs almost simultaneously on a single day, including in Dhaka. Subsequent suicide attacks on courts killed 25 people and injured hundreds.

(Reporting by Ruma Paul; Editing by Nick Macfie)

U.S. says Islamic State committed genocide against Christians

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State has committed genocide against Christians, Yazidis and Shi’ite Muslims, the United States said on Thursday, a finding U.S. officials hope will bring more resources to help the groups even though it does not change U.S. military strategy or legal obligations.

“In my judgment, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shi’ite Muslims,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters, referring to the group by an Arabic acronym. “Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions.”

Republicans, who control the U.S. Congress, had pressured the Democratic White House to call the militants’ atrocities in Iraq and Syria genocide and the House of Representatives on Monday passed a nonbinding resolution 393-0 labeling them as such.

U.S. officials hope the determination will help them win political and budget support from Congress and other nations to help the targeted groups return home if and when Islamic State-controlled areas such as the Iraqi city of Mosul are liberated.

While the genocide finding may make it easier for Washington to argue for greater action against the group, U.S. officials said it does not create a U.S. legal obligation to do more, and would not change U.S. military strategy toward the militants.

On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: “Acknowledging that genocide or crimes against humanity have taken place in another country would not necessarily result in any particular legal obligation for the United States.”

U.S. President Barack Obama ordered air strikes against the group starting in 2014 but has made clear he wishes to avoid any large commitment of U.S. ground troops.

Unlike in Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur in 2004, where the United States found that genocide had taken place but did not use military force to stop it, U.S. officials noted they began air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq in August 2014 in part to save the Yazidi minority group from targeted attack.

“We didn’t act in Rwanda. We looked back and regretted it. We didn’t act militarily in Darfur. In this case within … days of the Yazidis being targeted by Daesh in Iraq, American planes were in the air trying to help them,” said a senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

‘WE’VE DONE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT’

Islamic State militants have swept through Iraq and Syria in recent years, seizing swathes of territory with an eye toward establishing jihadism in the heart of the Arab world.

The group’s videos depict the violent deaths of people who stand in its way. Opponents have been beheaded, shot dead, blown up with fuses attached to their necks and drowned in cages in swimming pools, with underwater cameras capturing their agony.

Kerry argued the United States has done much to fight the group since 2014, but did not directly answer a question on why it had not done more to prevent genocide.

“We’re very confident we’ve done an enormous amount,” he told reporters as he walked down a hall at the State Department.

“The fact is that Daesh kills Christians because they are Christians. Yazidis because they are Yazidis. Shi’ites because they are Shi’ites,” Kerry said earlier, and accused Islamic State of crimes against humanity and of ethnic cleansing.

Islamic State militants have exploited the five-year civil war in Syria to seize areas in that country and in neighboring Iraq, though U.S. officials say their air strikes have markedly reduced the territory the group controls.

On-again, off-again peace talks got under way this week in Geneva in an effort to end the civil war, in which at least 250,000 people have died and millions have fled their homes. A fragile “cessation of hostilities” has reduced, but not ended, the violence over the last two weeks.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by James Dalgleish)

After alleged ban, “Jesus” reappears in Johnson Space Center newsletter

The name “Jesus” has reappeared in the Johnson Space Center newsletter, drawing celebration from a religious freedom advocacy group that claimed NASA banned the name from publication.

The First Liberty Institute made the announcement Tuesday, exactly one month after threatening the space agency with a federal lawsuit over what it claimed was “blatant religious discrimination” against Christian employees in a prayer club at the Johnson Space Center.

The issue stems from an announcement that ran in the JSC Today newsletter last May.

According to the First Liberty Institute, the newsletter is emailed to all employees who work at the Houston facility. The JSC Praise and Worship Club, like other groups, routinely submitted announcements to the newsletter as a way to spread the word about its upcoming gatherings.

On May 28, the newsletter published an club-written announcement that included the line “The theme for this session will be Jesus is our life!” and invited other JSC employees to attend.

The First Liberty Institute claims that attorneys from NASA subsequently contacted the club and told them that “Jesus” could not be used in any future announcements, as it could lead someone to believe that NASA was endorsing Christianity and therefore violating the Establishment Clause, which prevents government entities from promoting one religion over another.

The employees countered that their speech was private and NASA’s restrictions amounted to illegal censorship. The club stopped using “Jesus” in announcements as it sought legal advice.

On February 17, nine days after the First Liberty Institute contacted the space agency, the newsletter published a JSC Praise and Worship Club announcement that included the line “The theme for this session will be Jesus is our Victory!” showing the name did appear in the email.

NASA’s attorneys contacted the First Liberty Institute the following day, saying there is no ban.

“JSC does not prohibit the use of any specific religious names in employee newsletters or other internal communications,” Chief Counsel Bernard J. Roan wrote in a letter to the institute.

Roan added in his letter that some NASA employees had expressed concerns that the prayer club’s May 28 announcement “went beyond mere announcement of the time, place and general nature of an activity; was essentially proselytizing; and, and as such, was inappropriate.”

He said that attorneys reached out to the club to discuss those concerns, but did not mention what, exactly, those conversations entailed. He did note the newsletter has published several “religiously-oriented postings” from the prayer club and other groups in the past few months.

“It is clear from subsequent ‘JSC Today’ postings for the Club that JSC to this day continues to facilitate its employees’ right to freely exercise their religious beliefs,” Roan wrote.

First Liberty’s Senior Counsel, Jeremy Dys, welcomed the recent developments.

“Although NASA’s initial censorship of the name ‘Jesus’ gave the Praise & Worship Club cause for alarm, we are grateful NASA took subsequent corrective action, and now clarifies its policy permitting religious expression by its employees,” Dys said in a statement.

Pastor Saeed shares stories about Iranian imprisonment at Liberty Convocation

The Christian pastor who spent 3-1/2 years behind bars in an Iranian prison recently spoke about the experience, sharing his insights into the power of faith in the face of persecution.

Saeed Abedini addressed Liberty University Convocation on Friday, and discussed the series of events that led to him receiving an eight-year prison sentence on charges related to his beliefs.

He spoke about growing up in a Muslim household in Iran, converting to Christianity as a 20-year-old and the numerous challenges he faced spreading the Gospel in his homeland.

“The first time they arrested me, they tried to put pressure on me to deny my faith. That was maybe 14, 13 years ago,” Abedini told those gathered at the university in Lynchburg, Virginia. “And then after torturing me psychologically and putting me into jail, they saw it doesn’t work. That’s the power of faith. You can see that Satan steps back when you stand firm in your faith.”

Abedini told the convocation he went through a cycle of “preaching, prison, preaching, prison” as authorities tried to stop his efforts to grow the church in a predominantly Islamic nation.

The struggle between Abedini, a naturalized United States citizen, and the Iranian government came to a head in 2012, when the pastor told the convocation that authorities accused him of trying to overthrow the government by converting Muslims to Christianity. The pastor was handed an eight-year prison sentence, but was freed in January as part of a prisoner exchange.

Abedini told the convocation that he was a witness of the power of prayer, and saw God at work in Iran. He added that having faith in Jesus Christ can bring light to even the darkest places.

“If you want to be realistic, there it’s very dark,” Abedini said during the convocation. “These people are very harsh. They really hate us. They really hate Christians. They really hate America, and they do everything that they can do to stop us. That’s the reality. But our Lord is above all these things. When you just come on your knees, you can see He is there.”

Abedini told the audience he shared Gospel with some of his fellow prisoners, “tens” of whom turned to Christ. He said the group of prisoners prayed and celebrated communion together, hiding the bread under blankets to conceal it from the prison’s security cameras.

“Some of them still are there,” Abedini said. “They need our (prayers).”

The pastor also shared a story about a prison guard torturing him in solitary confinement early in his prison sentence. He vowed to remain true to his Christian values and forgive the guard.

As Abedini was getting ready to leave the prison, he said he encountered that guard again. Abedini said he hugged the guard, told him he loved him and added he would pray for him.

“When we put ourselves in a situation to love people, God is going to open the door,” he said.

Indian priest kidnapped in deadly Yemen attack; Pope condemns world apathy

ADEN/VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Gunmen who killed at least 15 people in an old people’s home in Yemen last week also kidnapped an Indian priest, officials said on Sunday, as Pope Francis condemned the attack and the “indifference” of the world’s reaction to it.

No one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s incident in which four gunmen posing as relatives of one of the residents at the home burst inside, killing four Indian nuns, two Yemeni female staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard.

Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Twitter that an Indian national identified as Father Tom Uzhunnalil had been “abducted by terrorists in Yemen”. She said officials in neighboring Djibouti were trying to ascertain his whereabouts to secure his release.

Officials in the southern Yemeni city of Aden confirmed that the priest had been kidnapped and said authorities were investigating the attack. It sparked widespread condemnation, including from the Pope and the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which called it an act of terrorism.

Pope Francis called the nuns “today’s martyrs” because they were both victims of their killers and of global indifference.

“They do not make the front pages of the newspapers, they do not make the news. They have given their blood for the Church,” he said in his Sunday message to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square.

“They are victims of the attack by those who killed them but also victims of indifference, of this globalization of indifference. They don’t matter,” he added, departing from his prepared text.

International aid groups have pulled most of their foreign staff from Yemen but continue to operate on a reduced basis through local employees.

Aden has been racked by lawlessness since Hadi supporters, backed by Gulf Arab military forces, drove fighters of the Iran-allied Houthi group from the city in July last year.

The Yemeni government has repeatedly promised to restore security to the city but has so far had little success.

(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf in Aden and Philip Pullella in Rome, Writing by Sami Aboudi/Sylvia Westall; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Gunmen kill four nuns, at least 11 others in old people’s home in Yemen

ADEN (Reuters) – Four gunmen attacked an old people’s home in the Yemeni port of Aden on Friday, killing at least 15 people, including four Christian nuns from India, local officials and medical sources said.

The gunmen, who first told the guard they were on a visit to their mother, stormed into the home with rifles and opened fire, one local official said. As well as the nuns, the dead included two Yemeni women working at the facility, eight elderly residents and a guard.

The motive of the gunmen was not immediately known. They fled after the attack, the official said.

The bodies of those killed have been transferred to a clinic supported by medical group Medecins Sans Frontieres, medical sources said.

Yemen’s embattled government is based in Aden but has struggled to impose its authority there since its forces, backed by Gulf Arab troops, expelled Iran-allied Houthi fighters who still control the country’s capital, Sanaa.

Once a cosmopolitan city home to thriving Hindu and Christian communities, Aden has gone from one of the world’s busiest ports as a key hub of the British empire to a largely lawless backwater.

Aden’s small Christian population left long ago. Unknown assailants have previously vandalized a Christian cemetery, torched a church and last year blew up an abandoned Catholic church.

(Reporting By Mohammed Mukhashaf; additional reporting by Mohammed Ghobari in Cairo; Writing By Maha El Dahan; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Religion met with growing hostility in America, new report finds

The United States is seeing a growing number of cases of religious discrimination and persecution, according to a new report from an religious freedom advocacy group.

The First Liberty Institute, formerly known as the Liberty Institute, released its annual look into the state of religious freedoms in the United States on Friday.

The 376-page report titled “Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion In America” contains 1,285 of what the nonprofit calls “attacks on religion in America.”

In a news release, the organization claims that number has doubled since it first published the annual report in 2012. But the most recent report includes older cases, some of which date back to the 1980s, that were not among the 600 cases that were published in the group’s first report.

Still, the new report contains dozens of cases that worked their way through the legal system or were mentioned in media reports in 2015. The organization has said it handled more than 400 religious liberty cases last year, a record total, and was bracing to eclipse that number in 2016.

“Hostility to religion in America is rising like floodwaters, as proven by the increased numbers of cases and attacks documented in this report,” First Liberty Institute President, CEO and Chief Counsel Kelly Shackelford wrote in the report. “This flood is engulfing ordinary citizens who simply try to live normal lives according to their faith and conscience.”

The report details cases in schools, churches, ministries, the military and the public arena.

In his introduction to the report, Shackelford argues that the hostility is a “national problem” that should concern all Americans — not just those of faith — because of its broad impacts.

“Religious freedom is in the First Amendment because all other freedoms rest upon it. Without the concept of a higher authority to make government accountable to unchanging principles of justice, all other freedoms are at risk of being violated, redefined, or revoked by government,” he wrote.

The report contains a broad range of allegations of religious discrimination against people of a variety of faiths. Notably, they include a high school football coach in Washington State who was suspended after he prayed on the 50-yard line, a substitute teacher in New Jersey who was fired after he gave a student a Bible, a Jewish prisoner who was denied Kosher meals and a Muslim woman who said a clothing store did not hire her because of her religious headscarf.

Shackelford concluded his introduction on a positive note, writing “the vast majority” of challenges to religious freedoms in the report were illegal and would not hold up in court.

“It succeeds only because of its own bluff and the passivity of its victims,” he wrote. “Hostility to religion can be defeated in the legal system—but only if challenged by Americans like you.”