- Update 1/23/10 from CNS News via Wintery Knight blog: "One Year Later, Obama Administration's Top Religious Post Still Vacant. Excerpt:
One year after President Obama took office, the administration’s top international religious freedom post remains empty, at a time when a wave of religious persecution is troubling veteran campaigners.
“President Obama has not yet named an ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom,” a State Department press officer confirmed by phone late Wednesday.
The Christian advocacy organization Open Doors USA launched a petition Wednesday urging Obama to appoint an ambassador immediately, saying that leaving the position unfilled violated U.S. law.
“By not having an ambassador-at-large for the past 12 months, the U.S. has failed to demonstrate the importance of religious freedom,” said advocacy director Lindsay Vessey.
- (Original Post) - Cliff May asks why the rest of the world refuses to pay attention and express outrage:
Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries, and schools, and seizing Christian properties. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!
In response to all this, Western journalists, academics, diplomats, and politicians mainly avert their eyes and hold their tongues. They pretend there are no stories to be written, no social pathologies to be documented, no actions to be taken. . . [more . . .]
On Tuesday, Coptic Christians took to the streets in front of the UN to protest the killing of Christians by Muslims in Egypt. Pamela Geller offers commentary and a gallery of pictures of which the following are samples:
It is time for America, for President Obama to demand that President Mubarak end this genocide.
Colson - The American Press doesn't cover religion well at all!