"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." Northwoods is a ministry dedicated to refreshing Christians and challenging them to search for the truth in Christianity, politics, sociology, and science
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life"
Father God, thank you for the love of the truth you have given me. Please bless me with the wisdom, knowledge and discernment needed to always present the truth in an attitude of grace and love. Use this blog and Northwoods Ministries for your glory. Help us all to read and to study Your Word without preconceived notions, but rather, let scripture interpret scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit. All praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Please note: All my writings and comments appear in bold italics in this colour
Saudi Arabia's Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned a death sentence handed to 27-year-old Sri Lankan guest worker over a Facebook post allegedly offending Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. File Photo by Mike Theiler/UPI | License Photo
Oct. 14 (UPI) --Saudi Arabia's highest court on Wednesday threw out a death sentence handed to a 27-year-old Sri Lankan guest worker over a Facebook post offending Islam, said Sri Lankan Deputy Foreign Minister Arun Hemachandra.
A Saudi appellate court imposed the sentence in September after finding Anojan Sivarasa guilty of blasphemy against Islam and the Prophet Muhammad in September, sparking outrage among Sri Lankans and international human rights groups and prompting an intensive diplomatic campaign on his behalf.
Thanking Saudi authorities for their cooperation, Hemachandra said the outcome was due to the "sustained diplomatic and legal efforts" of Sri Lanka's ambassador, officials of the foreign and overseas workers' ministries and legal teams in both countries.
Sivarasa is alleged to have posted a comment in his native Tamil insulting the Prophet Muhammad in response to a derogatory post about a Hindu deity during a heated online exchange over religion in June.
Sivarasa removed the post and issued an apology but was arrested in July.
Sri Lankan member of parliament Faizer Mustafa, who was involved in the legal negotiations with Riyadh, told the BBC's Sinhala-language service that the death sentence had been set aside and that the Supreme Court's judgment was in the process of being reviewed.
Human Rights Watch criticized what it said was Saudi Arabia's use of unprecedented sentences for speech-related infractions.
"Saudi authorities should end their use of abusive laws to hand out extraordinary sentences for speech-related offenses, especially against migrant workers who are already in a vulnerable position with limited protections," Human Rights Watch senior Saudi Arabia researcher Joey Shea said Tuesday.
It was unclear if or how Wednesday's reprieve in the Supreme Court affects other criminal sanctions imposed on Sivarasa by the lower courts, including a five year prison sentence and an $800,000 fine.
An Ethiopian refugee who fled the Tigray conflict prays during Sunday Mass at an Ethiopian Orthodox church building built by former Ethiopian refugees, at the village next to Um Raquba refugee camp in Gedaref, eastern Sudan, on December 6, 2020. Some 400 Orthodox Christian believers attended the biggest mass at Jibreel (Gabriel) Church since it reopened its doors just over a week ago to refugees at Um Raqouba camp near the Ethiopian border. | Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The United States is on track to admit zero Christians fleeing from the world's worst countries for persecution in fiscal year 2026, according to a new report from the global watchdog Open Doors and the Evangelical refugee resettlement agency World Relief.
The organizations unveiled their new report Thursday at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, documenting the state of Christian persecution worldwide and the number of refugees admitted into the U.S.
The release comes one month before the Trump administration is set to determine the number of refugees to be admitted to the country in fiscal year 2027, which begins Oct. 1.
“The U.S. has essentially taken this golden door and closed it,” asserted World Relief CEO Myal Greene at Thursday’s event.
The report, titled “State of the Golden Door: Evaluating U.S. Refugee Resettlement and Asylum in Light of Global Christian Persecution,” states that the number of refugee admissions from the 50 countries on the 2026 Open Doors World Watch List had plummeted to zero in fiscal year 2026, which concludes at the end of the month.
While the report primarily focused on persecuted Christians, it acknowledged that the halt on refugee resettlement during the Trump administration has applied to all religious minorities in those countries, not just Christians.
“Only three refugees were resettled from a country on the Open Doors World Watch List, and those individuals were not religious minorities," the report states. "We can conclude with a high degree of confidence that in FY2026, no refugees experiencing religious persecution will be resettled in the U.S."
The report is critical of President Donald Trump’s designation of an “invasion” at the southern border, his halting of all refugee resettlement in a January 2025 executive order and the administration’s implementation of guidance encouraging enforcement officials to “remove any noncitizens attempting to enter either at or between ports of entry even if they were attempting to seek asylum.”
Although refugees have been admitted to the U.S. in fiscal year 2026, the Trump administration has prioritized the resettlement of white South Africans whom it describes as “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”Statistics in the report reveal that the asylum approval rate for countries on the World Watch List decreased from 58% in fiscal year 2023 to 10% in fiscal year 2026.
As fiscal year 2026 is on track to be the first year in at least a quarter century when not a single Christian refugee was admitted to the U.S., Open Doors estimates that 388 million Christians faced persecution worldwide — one out of every seven Christians around the globe.
Open Doors CEO Ryan Brown said “the breadth of persecution” and “the depth of persecution” against Christians have increased.
Specific examples of Christian persecution mentioned by Brown include Sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen a “continued surge in the ways that violence is characterizing the ways that persecution is being experienced by Christians on the ground there,” as well as the advancement of “digital surveillance” at “exponential rates” in countries such as China, where “the church is being monitored and technology is being used as a tool to create harm and displacement.”
The actions of the Trump administration as they relate to refugees and asylum seekers come as part of an effort to prioritize border security.
In an interview with The Christian Post, Brown lamented that “one of the things that has become confused in the discourse and the dialogue, especially with Christians, is these issues of border security, these issues of … folks fleeing for economic reasons or those types of opportunities that the U.S. seems to uniquely afford them.”
“That’s not what this report’s talking about," he said.
“This report is specifically talking about those individuals that have a reasonable fear for their life and their safety because of their Christian faith and identity,” Brown added. “Throughout the Church history … the Holy Spirit has used people having to leave because of persecution to bring the Gospel and to … spark revival in different places around the globe.”
Brown urged Christians to “prayerfully consider those things to try to just separate those issues that often seem to convolute issues of border security, issues of folks chasing economic opportunity and look at this issue of Christian persecution and those being forced to flee persecution on its own merits.”
He doesn't believe expanding refugee resettlement will endanger the border security the Trump administration has prioritized.
“Often when we engage these conversations, we can do so with this trepidation that there … are floodgates of individuals that … if we open the door a crack … that it’s going to be overflowing with … folks that are coming in," Brown said. "That is traditionally not the case.”
Brown characterized asylum seekers as “a relatively small number of people” who “truly have no other options,” insisting that “these are thousands of cases” as opposed to “millions of cases.”
Looking ahead to fiscal year 2027, Greene maintained that he is not "optimistic to expect a significant reversal of the policy.”
“That said, we’re people of faith, and we’re committed to being faithful in our advocacy and being consistent in bringing these causes to light,” he vowed. “We wouldn’t be issuing this report if we didn’t believe that there are Christians and people close to the administration who have a deep desire to see these policy changes and what that entails.”
World Relief Vice President of Advocacy and Policy Matthew Soerens expressed hope that Trump would reimplement the policy of his first administration, where the president made “individuals who are fleeing religious persecution a priority within the refugee determination in 2019.”
On July 9, 2026, Pakistan’s Supreme Court acquitted three death-row convicts in the 2014 lynching of Christian couple Shama Bibi and Shahzad Masih by a frenzied 100-member Muslim mob. With this verdict, the top court also wiped out the last remaining convictions in the case, leaving no one convicted in one of Pakistan’s most notorious anti-Christian mob killings. The court further dismissed the Punjab government’s appeal against the Lahore High Court’s earlier acquittal of more than 100 other defendants, effectively ending all criminal proceedings in the case.
The verdict marks the unfortunate and shameful final chapter in a gruesome case of religious hatred and Islamic violence that shocked Pakistan nearly 12 years ago. On Nov. 4, 2014, a Muslim mob brutally killed Shahzad Masih and his pregnant wife, Shama Bibi, in Kot Radha Kishan, a town in Punjab province’s Kasur district. The couple, both brick-kiln laborers and parents of three young children, faced false accusations of desecrating pages of the Quran after Shama reportedly burned household items and her deceased father-in-law’s personal belongings. Rumors quickly spread through the area, and local mosque loudspeakers amplified allegations of blasphemy, drawing hundreds of people to the brick kiln where the couple lived and worked.
Over 100 murderous Islamists stormed the kiln, violently dragged the couple from their living quarters, and beat them mercilessly. The bloodthirsty crowd tortured the hapless couple in full public view, without showing any signs of compassion for the pregnant woman, despite their desperate pleas for mercy.
Shama Bibi and Shahzad Masih, Morning Star News photo courtesy of family
They then threw the couple into the blazing furnace of the brick kiln, burning both of them alive. Although Muslim mobs have repeatedly killed non-Muslims after spreading false allegations that they had insulted the Quran, the Islamic prophet Muhammad, or Allah across South Asia, including the secular democracy of India, the sheer brutality of the attack on Shama Bibi and Shahzad Masih horrified human rights organizations, religious freedom advocates, and governments around the world; they condemned the lynching as one of the most gruesome acts of religious mob violence in recent history.
Police registered cases against hundreds of suspects, including many identified by name, and eventually indicted 106 people for their roles in the lynching. Prosecutors argued that several men had led the mob, while others actively participated in the assault or encouraged the violence. The scale of the attack and the large number of suspects made the prosecution one of Pakistan’s biggest criminal cases involving religiously motivated mob violence.
In November 2016, a Lahore Anti-Terrorism Court sentenced Hafiz Ishtiaq, Mehdi Khan, Riaz Kamboh, Muhammad Hanif, and Irfan Shakoor to death for their roles in the lynching and burning of the Christian couple. The court also sentenced eight other defendants to two years in prison for aiding the attack, and acquitted 93 suspects after prosecutors failed to prove their involvement in the killings. However, the verdict proved to be only temporary. In 2019, the Lahore High Court acquitted two of the five men who had received death sentences. The court also cleared another 102 defendants, citing the lack of sufficient evidence.
The Punjab government challenged those acquittals before the Supreme Court, while the remaining three men continued to face death sentences. The Supreme Court ultimately erased the last remaining convictions, ruling that the prosecution had failed to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, thereby ending a 12-year legal battle without holding a single person accountable for the brutal lynching of the Christian couple.
The disappointing verdict once again underscores how Pakistan’s justice system has repeatedly, perhaps deliberately, failed to protect victims and deliver justice in cases involving Muslim mob violence. Bishop Samson Shukardin, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Pakistan, said the acquittals denied justice to the murdered couple and their family. Several other Christian leaders also warned that the ruling could deepen fear among religious minorities, who already live under the constant threat of false blasphemy accusations and violent mob attacks.
The killing of Shama Bibi and Shahzad Masih remains one of the most horrific attacks on Pakistan’s Christian community in the past two decades. Similar outbreaks of anti-Christian violence have taken place in Gojra in 2009, Joseph Colony in Lahore in 2013, Jaranwala in 2023, and several other parts of the country where fanatical mobs have used false blasphemy allegations as a pretext for lynchings, burning churches and entire Christian neighborhoods and forcing residents to flee their homes. Despite repeated episodes of such violence, Pakistan has yet to demonstrate that it can consistently prevent these attacks or ensure accountability for those responsible.
LAHORE, Pakistan (Christian Daily International–Morning Star News) – A violent protest erupted in Karachi, Pakistan on Thursday (July 9) after unidentified persons mailed a desecrated page of the Quran to a Muslim shopkeeper along with photographs of a Christian and his mother, sources said.
Asif Bastian, a Karachi-based Christian rights advocate, said the envelope was delivered to Waleed General Store in Qazafi Colony, Baldia Town. It contained a burnt page of the Quran, photographs of 40-year-old Catholic Azeem Javaid and his mother, and an image of her national identity card.
“As news of the alleged desecration spread, several hundred Muslims, including activists from religious parties, gathered outside the street where Javaid’s home is located and began protesting,” Bastian told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “Around 10 to 15 Christian families live on that street, and they were effectively trapped inside their homes.”
The protesters hurled stones at police vehicles after officers arrived at the scene, forcing an initial withdrawal, Bastian said. The Sindh Province government deployed paramilitary Rangers alongside additional police to bring the situation under control.
“The government’s timely intervention prevented what could have become a major tragedy,” he said. “After officials assured protest leaders that police would conduct a thorough investigation and examine CCTV footage from the Saddar Post Office, where the envelope was reportedly mailed, the demonstration was called off.”
Bastian said authorities later used an armored police vehicle to evacuate Javaid’s family to a secure location.
A source close to the family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the incident appeared to be an attempt to falsely implicate Javaid in a blasphemy case or incite a mob attack against him.
“Javaid has a stable job and has never been involved in any religious controversy,” the source said. “He has had financial disputes with some individuals, so it is possible someone sought to frame him. It defies logic that a Christian would desecrate the Quran and then mail the material, along with his own photograph, to a shop directly across from his house. No one would deliberately implicate themselves in such a serious offense.”
The source said the family remains under police protection at an undisclosed location. Javaid, who was at work when the incident occurred, has also gone into hiding while authorities investigate the case….
So far, this seems like an unusually good response from police and Rangers.
Egypt: Muslim mob assaults Christians as it attacks church, police arrest the Christians
The police freed them only after they abandoned their complaint against the Muslims who attacked them. As in Pakistan and elsewhere, Christians in Egypt can expect no sympathy or protection from authorities. If Muslims victimize them, those authorities will all too often side with the people who are doing the victimizing, as a Muslim will know that if he defends Christians against Muslims, he will face opprobrium (and possibly violence) from his fellow Muslims. Also, Muslim police officers know that the Qur’an tells Muslims to be “ruthless to unbelievers, merciful to one another.” (48:29)
Egyptian police arrested four Christian men who had been assaulted by a mob during an attack on a Coptic place of worship in Egypt, and freed them two days later once they abandoned the complaint they lodged against those who beat them.
The attack took place in the Upper Egyptian village of Tal Al-Quiblya in Minya Province on Wednesday, according to the United Kingdom-based religious freedom advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), citing the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).
A crowd of Muslim residents, most of them women, children and teenagers, reportedly pelted the building with stones while chanting sectarian abuse.
Several Christians suffered injuries. Witnesses on the ground say that the structure and the priest’s car had been damaged.
Officers arrived rapidly and restored order, though only after taking the four Christian men into custody. Their release came on Friday, conditioned on the withdrawal of their complaint against the attackers.
An unknown number of Muslim residents were also arrested….
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has urged that Egypt be added to the State Department’s Special Watch List, which marks states that have carried out or tolerated grave abuses of religious freedom.
Prosecutors have used the country’s blasphemy statutes against people for voicing or defending their beliefs, imposing anything from fines to jail….
