August 24, 2021
Don’t Abandon the Christians in Afghanistan
By Dr. Barbara Reynolds
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In places like Afghanistan the Christian Church faces persecution and death as the Disciples of Jesus Christ did under the Roman Empire. St. Paul, the prolific writer of most of the New Testament, and St. James the brother of Jesus were beheaded, a form of terror still used by Islamic extremists today.
Christians ---about 20,000- in Afghanistan are facing the heightened threat of death as the Taliban takes control. The civilized world must not ignore their fate and use all the resources to aid them. In the past, foreign Christian workers in Afghanistan have been murdered and many have fled the country. Many secret believers are trying to flee the violent and extremist views of the Taliban, but scores of Christians are too poor and cannot afford to leave.
Afghanistan churches must operate underground and remain invisible in a country where Muslims who change their faith are breaking the law and considered to have betrayed their communities. Already since Kabul fell, Christians are reporting that the Taliban has been threatening their lives.
There as elsewhere in several Muslim territories, to be exposed as a Christian risk being charged with apostasy, punishable by death or imprisonment. In 2019, Reuters reported that the Islamic State released a video purporting to show its militants beheading 10 Christian men in Nigeria.
Relief organizations report that in May 2021, the Taliban bombed a Kabul high school, killing at least 85 people, mainly schoolgirls. The previous year, the Taliban staged a shooting at a maternity clinic, killing women, children, and babies.
Islamists beheading of its critics gained national focus with the murder of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan. In 2012, Islamic militant groups such as al-Qaeda used beheading as a propaganda tool, distributing gruesome photographs and videos of the executions to media outlets and on the Internet. ISIL, an extremist group in Iraq and Syria, staged mass beheadings of Syrian and Iraqi captives beginning in 2014 and used the threat of beheading to extract ransom payments from some Western governments. Several British and American hostages reportedly were beheaded by ISIL.
Historically, however, beheading is not the weapon of choice primarily of Islamic extremists nor the Romans who used it along with throwing Christians in cages with ferocious lions. Ritual decapitation known as seppuku was practiced in Japan from the 15th through the 19th century. The guillotine was used on criminals of ordinary birth during the French Revolution. According to tradition, beheading by sword was introduced to England by William the Conqueror in the 11th century but was stopped in 1747, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Today it is the extremist Islamic groups that continue beheading, a terrible gruesome form of murder. Prayerfully, the United Nations, and all nations of the world will ban together to aid the Christians in Afghanistan. They can not be left to fend for themselves.