War on Christianity - China: Police Arrest Christians Participating in Zoom Easter Worship Service

China is a member of the UN's Human Rights Council

By Leah MarieAnn Klett, Christian Post 

A church is seen beside a laver farm at the Gutong Village of Sansha Township on October 15, 2007

in Xiapu County of Fujian Province, China. | Getty Images/China Photos

Several members of China’s heavily persecuted Early Rain Covenant Church were arrested by communist authorities for participating in an online Easter worship service on Zoom and ordered to cease all religious activity.

Persecution watchdog group International Christian Concern reports that the Christians were participating in a Zoom worship service from their homes on Easter Sunday when six leaders were arrested and detained by the Public Security Bureau. 

The 5,000-member Sichuan house church, led by pastor Wang Yi, has not been able to gather in person since the communist regime shut down the church in 2018 and arrested their pastor and other leaders. Since then, it has opted to gather online.

A member of ERCC told ICC, “At that time I was also in the Zoom call, but there was a long period of time where I did not hear a thing. I thought it’s the network connection issue at first, but I soon heard a quarrel erupt. Our co-worker Wang Jun was questioning some people, [saying], ‘Who are you to do this [to us]?’”

She added that in addition to Wang, other key church leaders including Guo Haigang, Wu Wuqing, Jia Xuewei, Zhang Jianqing and Zhang Xudong were also taken away. One member’s home had its electricity cut off, while others received phone calls that “police [were] coming to visit them soon.”

A supporter of ERCC also shared on Twitter, “Since 8:30 a.m., some security officials have entered these Christian families’ homes and pretended to be chatting with them casually. At 9:30 a.m., the worship began, and they were also invited to participate. Once they realized that the sermon was from ERCC’s imprisoned pastor Wang Yi, they immediately shut it down.”

Her account was corroborated by Zhang Jiangqing, who was warned by the police at his house, saying, “Don’t participate in already banned [religious] activities anymore! Don’t listen to pastor [Wang]’s sermons anymore! If you do this again, we will deal with it seriously and take you away!”

The six Christians have since been released, and their electricity was restored in the afternoon.

Early Rain Covenant Church was first raided during a Sunday evening service in December 2018 after authorities claimed it violated religious regulations because it was not registered with the government. Wang was detained along with his wife, Jiang Rong, and more than 100 members of his congregation.

Pastor Wang was later sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of subversion of power and illegal business operations. 

Gina Goh, ICC’s regional manager for Southeast Asia, condemned the government’s actions, pointing out that local authorities have continued to monitor and harass ERCC members since 2018 “with the hope that the church will disperse itself.”

“In a time when the Chinese people are suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the heartless regime chose to inflict more trouble on its citizens,” she said. “The U.N. should immediately suspend China’s appointment to the Human Rights Council for its lack of respect for human rights.”

In China, where the novel coronavirus originated, isolating in place has presented an opportunity for communist authorities to ramp up its campaign against Christianity.

On Easter Sunday, the state-sanctioned Donghu Church in China’s Qinghai province was demolished. According to China Aid, a team from the Xining City Chengxi District Urban and Rural Construction Bureau demolished the church in just two hours, labeling it as illegal while citing “safety concerns.”

On April 2, Bethel Church pastor Zhao Huaiguo was arrested after being criminally detained since March 14 for “inciting subversion of state power.”

According to China Aid, a local Christian shared that the authorities have been hostile toward pastor Zhao since his church refused to join the state-sanctioned church and rejected government officials’ intervention. 

“He was accused of proselytizing and distributing Gospel tracts, which were considered illegal acts. After the Lunar New Year last year, the religious bureau forced the church to disperse, to which it refused. The official ban arrived last April,” said the local Christian.

Religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter reported that in mid-March, crosses were removed from multiple churches in the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui and in the neighboring Shandong, the prefecture-level city of Linyi.

In February, officials removed a cross from a government-approved Three-Self church in Hexi village. The church was built in 2007 and has complied with state regulations, implementing the four requirements of the government’s religion “sinicization” campaign. Additionally, it had stopped all gatherings during the coronavirus epidemic. Nevertheless, it was not spared in the crackdown. 

“The government does not provide enough help during the epidemic but instead demolishes crosses,” a local believer said.

China is ranked on Open Doors USA’s World Watch List as one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to the persecution of Christians. 

China has also been labeled by the U.S. State Department as a “country of particular concern” for “continuing to engage in particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”

China’s Zhejiang Province Destroying Dozens of Christian Churches

How China Uses Intimidation, Negotiation to Bring Christians Under Its Control

War on Christianity - India, Pakistan, China, Ethiopia, Kenya

Rex Murphy: The Yaniv Outrage has Left Canada, Rightly, the Laughing Stock of the World

The silent passing over of this story is journalistic cowardice, the fear of offending the passing pieties of militant progressivism

Progressivism is a new-speak term for far-left

Jessica Yaniv, a transgender woman in B.C., has filed over a dozen human rights complaints against businesses

she alleges discriminated against her on the basis of gender identity. Courtesy Jessica Yaniv, @trustednerd

Rex Murphy

A friend of mine recently went to his local garage, claimed he was a re-conditioned ’79 Chevy Nova and asked them to do a timing check on the carburetor and rotate his tires. They said they wouldn’t because he didn’t have a carburetor, or tires, and they only worked on “cars.” He is off now to the local human rights tribunal (after a stop for spare parts at Canadian Tire).

The strange, ominous and creepy case before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is reverberating around the world. This is the case of the person, variously identified on the Internet as Jonathan or Jessica Yaniv, who has mounted a campaign to force unwilling cosmeticians to do a “Brazilian Wax” on their still very present testicles and penis. Yaniv has filed complaints against them all.

As I wrote last week, these are all women, some immigrants, and on the economic and cultural margins — 16 in total, according to most accounts. At least one, originally from Brazil, has had to close her small business. All have been under intense duress, and the vexatious complainant is notably hostile to immigrants (social media posts by Yaniv, then identifying as Jonathan, are remarkably insulting to newcomers to Canada). Some have paid Yaniv $2,500 dollars to lay off, while others equipped themselves with lawyers, at their own expense, had the complaints dropped.

It is a very disturbing case — and for more reasons than the harassment of these women. It raises questions not only about the human rights tribunal but about many of the main organs of Canadian journalism.

The latter first: The Times of London has a story on it, a popular Irish radio show talked to Yaniv (angry about the questions, Yaniv hung up, but only after telling the host she was capable of getting pregnant). A far continent away, The Australian gives a full account of the story. Hundreds of other serious and widely followed news sites and blogs in Canada, the U.S., and abroad have done the same.

This is not a local story. And when tweet-master Ricky Gervais fired off this projectile of compressed lucidity, the matter had the Twitter equivalent of an Apollo liftoff: “It is a woman’s right to say ‘I don’t wax testicles. On a man or a woman.’ End of discussion. No sexism. No homophobia. No transphobia.” The world is listening to this squalid tale.

Is it not Canadian news that the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is giving this apparently aggressive and eagerly litigious person such specialized and respectful attention?

   

From my perspective the core of the story is not Yaniv, whom, from what I have read, presents as opportunistic, cruel and delusionally self-entitled, who manipulates the ever-changing fixations of identity and gender politics for (a) notoriety, (b) possible gain, and (c) some delight in pushing and insulting hard-up people, especially Asians and newcomers (see last week’s column) as a very questionable personal amusement.

Where is this yarn — outside the National Post and Toronto Sun — in the large media of this country? CTV, CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star? Silence. (The Post Millennial has covered the story, as has Blaire White, herself a transgender woman — she posted her work on YouTube.) Perhaps the TV networks have an excuse. After all you cannot expect to have a full seven hours live on the comatose Mueller hearings and cover the Trump presidency every 15 minutes, and still serve up a story of harassment of immigrants and very strange and creepy behaviour out of Vancouver. (Were Trump to tweet on the matter, of course, the panels would be endless, righteous outrage infinite.)

Is it not Canadian news that the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is giving this apparently aggressive and eagerly litigious person such specialized and respectful attention? At the same time as 16 women are going through what must be to them a frightening, perplexing and tormenting legal grinder? Why are the Canadian media not at least reporting on what they are going through?

Is it simply because even the word “transgender” is kryptonite to the brave media who are always otherwise anxious to write and broadcast “truth to power”? The silent passing over of this story is journalistic cowardice, the fear of offending the passing pieties of militant progressivism.

As to the Tribunal, is it simply enough — see mocking epigraph above — for someone to walk into its offices, self-declare “I am a trans woman and I can’t get my scrotum waxed,” and have them take on the case? Is that truly all it takes?

Did the tribunal’s members think maybe if 16 — 16! — women unanimously turned Yaniv down, the problem was more likely with the would-be customer, not the provider? Did they consider the upheaval in their lives as solemnly as they presided over this transparently noxious, trivial, illogical and indulgent complaint?

In my column last week, I lamented the Tribunal’s lack of common sense. This week I ask where’s their sense of human sympathy, compassion for the newcomer — and to use one of their most-beloved terms, for the marginalized? The woman from Brazil has lost her income while Yaniv enjoys the publicity.

People do not choose to wax other people’s genitals for love of the craft. They are poor. They likely want to provide for their children so those children will never have to face the unpalatable chore of tending to other people’s privates, male or female, privates. These selfless people, who condescend to this work are, properly considered, moral heroes. Parents who do what all great parents have done, work for the good of their children. But now they are “defendants” in a Canadian court, accused of being transphobic bigots.

Of Yaniv’s other alleged activities, I will not disturb your stomachs with full recount. But if you can combine a fixation on tampons and very young girls, texting young girls with child pornography pictures, proposing all-nude swims for 12-year-olds and you can easily compose it for yourself.

There are people who might actually need the protection of a rights tribunal. But not the bullying and troubled being who wants their privates barbered under force of law.

Canada is a laughing stock in half the world over this cruel and transparent farce.

National Post

It seems to me that these women have a case to take to the Human Rights Council, the same council Yanis appealed to, or maybe a law-suit. But they would need the support of a right-wing NGO to be able to challenge this PCMadness in court. Perhaps the Human Rights Council's myopic views need to be challenged in a higher court.

In the War on Christianity, Alberta's NDP Bring Out the Hammer

Alberta school board serves notice it will stop operating controversial Christian academy

Camrose board, school society battling over Bible verses

proposed for student handbook

CBC News 

A dispute about Bible verses has led to a decision by the public school board in Camrose to stop operating a Christian K-12 school in nearby Kingman, Alta. (CBC)

Camrose school board, Christian academy no closer to resolution over contentious Bible verse Alberta Christian school worried school division could ban Bible verses

The public school board in Camrose, Alta., southeast of Edmonton says it will stop operating a Christian school next year after the school refused to drop Bible verses that could be considered offensive from its student handbook.

In a letter dated Thursday, the Battle River School Division said it will no longer operate Cornerstone Christian Academy School after June 30, 2018.

A lease agreement for the school building in Kingman, 27 kilometres north of Camrose, is also being terminated as of next June.

The school has operated as an alternative program under the Battle River division since 2009.

The decision to close the school next year is the latest move in an ongoing battle between the board and the school society over what can be taught to the K-12 Christian academy's 160 students.

Trustees voted in favour of the move at a special board meeting Thursday.

Several Bible verses were to be included in a handbook for students. One reference from Corinthians suggests that neither "fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate ... shall inherit the kingdom of God."

Battle River board trustees have said they believe the verses might contravene Alberta's human rights code.

Will they take it to the Alberta Human Rights Council? Will they declare the Bible to be hate literature? Not very likely, but then, there is an NDP (read far-left) government in Alberta and a far-left Liberal government in Ottawa, so anything is possible.

In her Thursday letter to Cornerstone chair Deanna Margel, Battle River board chair Laurie Skori said the current arrangement "cannot continue on the current basis" until both sides can agree on the "appropriate roles and involvement at the school level.

"As a public school board we must ensure that any educational programming provided complies with board policy and procedure, provincial legislation including the Alberta Human Rights Act and the School Act," the letter said.

"Unless those concerns can be resolved, we are unable to maintain the current relationship."

John Carpay, a Calgary lawyer working with the Cornerstone Christian Academy Society, dismissed the concerns that the school's use of Bible verses might violate Alberta's human rights code.

"It's a stupid claim," Carpay said. "The school board's lawyer was asked to cite one section of the Alberta human rights law that prohibits a Christian school from reading, studying, teaching Bible verses and the lawyer was asked repeatedly and could not cite a single section." 

Resolution could still come

But Skori leaves open the possibility that "a mutually acceptable resolution to our respective concerns can occur over the next weeks or months."

In a news release, Cornerstone Christian Academy said it wants to continue working with the school board to operate the academy.

"We are deeply saddened by the BRSD's decision to terminate our agreement," Margel said in a statement.

She said the board's decision "makes no sense if they truly desire to continue working together. It seems unwise, and completely unnecessary, to throw away years of productive co-operation in mere weeks because we've simply hit an unusual bump in the road. Things just don't add up."

Saudi Arabia - Leading the World in Human Rights!!!!!!???

Saudi prince flogged by police after court ruling

© Reuters

A Saudi Prince from the kingdom’s ruling royal Al Saud family has been flogged in prison as part of a court-ordered punishment just weeks after another prince was executed for murder, according to local reports.

Okayz Daily, a Saudi Arabian daily newspaper located in the port city of Jeddah, reported Wednesday that the unidentified prince was given lashes in a prison in the city on Monday.

It comes less than a month after Prince Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was put to death in Riyadh for shooting dead another man, identified as Adel al-Mahemid, in a brawl. It was the first execution of a member of the Saudi royal family in more than four decades.

Kabir was the 134th person to be put to death in the country in 2016, according to an AFP tally of ministry statements confirming executions.

The legal system of Saudi Arabia is based on Sharia law, under which murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy are all punishable by death.

The oil rich country and close ally of the US had the third highest number of executions in 2015 after Iran and Pakistan, according to Amnesty International.

China is not included in the ranking as the data is treated as a state secret but the human rights organization believes China remains the world’s top executioner.

‘Like asking if you’ll stop beating your wife’

Saudi ambassador dodges Yemen cluster bomb question

 © Zaid Jilani / YouTube

The Saudi ambassador to the US has dodged a journalist’s question on the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, saying it’s like asking, “Will you stop beating your wife?” He also said the Saudi-led coalition will continue bombing Yemen, “no matter what.”

Prince Abdullah Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, was confronted by a reporter from the Intercept, the publication said on Tuesday.

“Will you continue to use cluster weapons in Yemen?” the reporter asked the diplomat.

Al-Saud laughed before answering: “This is like the question, ‘Will you stop beating your wife?’”

After the reporter repeated the question, the ambassador again dismissed it, saying “You are political operators. I’m not a politician.”

Speaking at the Annual Arab-US Policymakers Conference last week, al-Saud insisted that the Saudi-led coalition will continue its bombing campaign in Yemen, the Intercept reported. “If anyone attacks human lives and disturbs the border, in whatever region, we’re going to continue hitting them, no matter what,” said al-Saud.

On Monday, the US envoy to the UN, Samantha Power, called on the Saudi-led coalition to “refrain from taking steps that escalate violence” in Yemen. However, her appeal contradicts Washington’s actions, with the Pentagon continuing to supply arms and provide military support to Riyadh.

Earlier, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Saudi-led coalition of war crimes following an airstrike on a funeral in Yemen on October 8. In that incident, at least two air-dropped munitions penetrated the roof of a hall containing over 1,000 mourners during the funeral ceremony of Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the Sanaa-based administration’s interior minister, Jalal al-Rawishan. At least 140 people were killed and 610 wounded.

Despite calls by US officials to review its support for its Middle Eastern ally, Washington continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, approving more than $20 billion in military sales in 2015 alone, HRW reports.


According to UN data from August this year, the Saudi intervention in Yemen has claimed the lives of at least 10,000 people, including almost 4,000 civilians. The UN and HRW have repeatedly accused the Saudi military of dropping cluster bombs in Yemeni residential areas.


Saudi Arabia leading the world in human rights!!!!!!???

So, in spite of bombing funerals in a foreign country, in spite of wife-beating being a standing joke, in spite of beheadings and floggings, often for what would not even be crimes in a civilized country - Saudi Arabia just got re-elected to the UN Human Rights Council. To make matters worse, the head of that council is also a Saudi. 

Saudi Arabia exercises Sharia law which is founded in 7th century, barbarian, madness and has no place in the 21st century. Yet, there will be no complaints about human rights from the UN.

Saudi Arabia is flexing its muscles in many corners of the world and is becoming more dangerous by the hour. The low price of oil is causing considerable financial stress in Riyadh, the consequences of which could be global in extent. The Saudis have loaned billions, if not trillions of dollars to western countries and the fear of them recalling those loans may explain why western countries keep selling mountains of military weapons to the kingdom. Or, maybe it is just greed.