Source/Credit: Bennington Banner
By Bennington Banner | March 28, 2012
In a presidential primary campaign season in which GOP candidates have loudly trumpeted the spurious charge that President Obama is waging a "war on religion," a recent report indicates what real religious persecution looks like around the world -- and the news is not good.
According to the 2012 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom -- an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission -- in the past year "an ongoing crisis of equal breadth and scope frequently went unnoticed," given the predominance of world economic woes.
"Across the global landscape, the pivotal human right of religious freedom was under escalating attack," the report states. "To an alarming extent, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief was being curtailed, often threatening the safety and survival of innocent persons, including members of religious minorities."
In some nations the government is directly persecuting religious groups, the report states. "In Egypt, an epicenter of the Arab Spring, hope turned to dismay." Human rights conditions, particularly abuses of religious freedom, worsened under military rule. "Law enforcement and the courts fostered a climate of impunity in the face of repeated attacks against Coptic Christians and their churches."
In China, government persecution of Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims was at the worst level in decades. Burma, which calls itself Myanmar, has one of the worst human rights records on the planet: "Religious groups, particularly ethnic minority Christians and Muslims and Buddhist monks suspected of engaging in anti-government activity, faced intrusive monitoring, arrest, mistreatment, destruction or desecration of property, severe restrictions on worship...and targeted violence," according to the report.
In Iran, the government continued to attack the Bah'ai minority, as well as Zoroastrians, Sufi Muslims, and Christians. "Members of these groups were harassed, arrested, and imprisoned, including Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, a Christian convert who was put on trial for his life." The theocracy in Iran fomented hatred against Jews through various means, including denying the Holocaust.
The report notes that other countries, by failing "to prevent or punish violence against vulnerable religious minorities provided a grim portrait of how states can create or fuel a culture of impunity, encouraging private citizens or groups to threaten, intimidate or even murder others."
In Nigeria, for instance, the government has for years failed to stem or punish Muslim-Christian violence. Violence in the last year claimed 800 lives, displacing 65,000 people and leading to the destruction of both churches in mosques.
Pakistan, according to the report, both tolerates religious discrimination and engages in it. Through anti-blasphemy laws and laws persecuting the Ahmadi Muslim sect, Pakistan "continues to both engage in and tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief."
A particularly egregious example is the government's failure to even charge anyone in the March 2011 murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian and federal minister for Minority Affairs and an advocate for religious freedom.
Numerous Christian denominations in the U.S. are quite sensitive to the persecution of their co-religionists in the Middle East, which has led a large portion of them to flee their homelands. "Whether Ahmadis, Bahai's, Christians, or others, religious minority individuals and their communities are -- to a chilling extent -- in trouble," the report states. "Across much of the Middle East, Christian communities that have been a presence for nearly 20 centuries have experienced severe declines in population, aggravating their at-risk status in the region."
Given these well-documented realities around the world, the give-and-take in American political life between the freedom to freely exercise religion without unnecessary government interference and the freedom in a pluralistic society for individuals to not have the mandates of other people's faiths imposed on them seems merely just the ongoing, and often messy, work of democracy.
Read original post here: The global war on religion
This content-post is archived for backup and record keeping purposes. The views expressed by the author and source of this news archive do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of Ahmadiyya Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comments. Any comments irrelevant to the post's subject matter, containing abuses, and/or vulgar language will not be approved.