2008 OLympics Excuse for Christian Persecution
China has made headlines in its efforts to clean smog from Beijing’s Olympic skies, but word is leaking out that the government is also making efforts to clean Christians out of the streets as the games draw near.
“There’s been a dramatic rise in cases of persecution that we’ve seen in the months leading up to the Olympics,” a staff writer for China Aid Association, Daniel Burton, told WND. “We’ve received reports that the government wants to eradicate the house church before the start of the Olympics.”
China Aid Association, an organization dedicated to helping persecuted Christians and founded by a man who escaped from China after being imprisoned for teaching Bible classes, maintains ties with China’s underground church. Those sources tell CAA that state police have taken up a new tactic: compelling discovered house church Christians in the Beijing area to sign a covenant promising not to meet from July 30 to Sept. 30, the time period the Olympics and Paralympics are being held in the city.
“Reports come from house church members who have been persecuted, and we have direct contact with them,” Burton told WND. “Police are making people sign the covenant then taking it away, so we can’t get our hands on the actual document. But it’s been reported from people that police are making them sign the covenant not to meet.”
Burton told WND that in most cases, the Beijing Public Security Bureau uses the same terror-raid tactics to stifle free associations of Christians in what the government calls the “unregistered church”: Police storm a building where a house church is meeting, arrest the pastor, disband the members and warn them not to meet again.
The government has been finding these house churches, knocking down the doors, arresting the pastors, beating and interrogating members of the church – all illegal according to China’s own religious laws – in order to get these people shut down,” Burton told WND
Christian persecution, torture and murder is not uncommon in the P.R.C., when I went there quite often in the eighties and nineties, there were often stories even in the Chinese media of Christians being shot down like dogs in the streeet in inland provinces. But, it ought to give President Bush some tiny pause on his journey to Beijing to realize that fellow Christians are being persecuted by the same government he intends to honor during his visit. Perhaps not though, after all Christians are fastly becoming the enemy of the state here and like is comon among Jews, they too are being killed around the world like so many rabid dogs.
Voice of the Marytrs has all the details of Christian persecution in China and other places in the world.
For the whole story:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=71508
