Got News? Iran Persecutes Christian Convert

July 11, 2011 By

The other night I came across an announcement from the U.S. State Department that began:

We are dismayed over reports that the Iranian courts are requiring Youcef Nadarkhani to recant his Christian faith or face the death penalty for apostasy – a charge based on his religious beliefs. If carried out, it would be the first execution for apostasy in Iran since 1990.

If this is a big enough story for the State Department to issue a warning, certainly it’s newsworthy, right? But apparently the “repent or die” sentence of a Christian convert in Iran is not that interesting to the media.

The Christian and human rights press is all over it. But the only mainstream treatment I saw was from Agence France Press.

Here’s their headline:

Iran ‘annuls death term’ for Christian pastor

So if a court told someone who was facing certain death that he only faced certain death if he refused to recant his faith, would you say that’s an “annulment” of the death sentence? I wouldn’t.

Here’s the story:

Iran’s supreme court has overturned a death sentence handed down to Yusef Nadarkhani, a Christian pastor accused of apostasy for having converted from Islam, his lawyer told AFP on Sunday.

“The supreme court has annuled the death sentence and sent the case back to the court in Rasht (his hometown), asking the accused to repent,” Mohammad Ali Dadkhah said.

Nadarkhani, now 32, converted from Islam to Christianity at the age of 19 and became a pastor of a small evangelical community called the Church of Iran.

He was arrested in October 2009 and condemned to death for apostasy under Iran’s Islamic Sharia laws, which however allow for such verdicts to be overturned if the convicted person “repents” and renounces his conversion.

The lawyer himself has been sentenced to nine years in jail and a 10-year ban on practicing law or teaching at the university for “actions and propaganda against the Islamic regime.”

I get that the lawyer is saying that all Nadarkhani, married father of two, has to do to avoid the death penalty is repent. But AFP should figure out that this is not a legal victory for Nadarkhani. And other media outlets might want to pay attention to Iran’s thinking on executing Christian converts and imprisoning leaders of Baha’i and flogging of Sufis.

Image via Present Truth Ministries.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Godbeat, Got news?, Islam, Journalism, World
  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    The MSM often isn’t exactly Paul Revere rushing to tell us about stories flooding the Christian press and the human rights press about an Islamic country working toward hanging someone who decided to become a Christian. Don’t they realize their unanimous ignoring of a story probably millions are talking about or e-mailing about makes them look like censors on behalf of Islam or totally incompetent. (Giving further reason to ditch MSM products).

  • Dave

    For once I agree with the Deacon. The actual attitude of the MSM is probably more like “Ah, there they go again; this isn’t news” than some kind of Islamophilic cover-up, but when ink is flowing in the Christian and human-rights press and only trickling in the MSM it’s defensible to draw a hostile conclusion.

  • http://ontheotherfoot.blogspot.com Joel

    Don’t they realize their unanimous ignoring of a story probably millions are talking about or e-mailing about makes them look like censors on behalf of Islam or totally incompetent.

    Deacon John, I don’t think it’s because this is a Christian-Muslim conflict so much as because… well, this is Iran we’re talking about. Nobody really expects them to have any respect for anybody’s human rights. I’m not saying that to be snarky; I think we really do expect Iran to be abusive in the same way that we expect a dog to defile fireplugs. It’s just Iran being Iran.

    So this particular story is only newsworthy to the Christian press because it involves one or our own. (However, the cynic in me would be curious to see the newsworld’s reaction if he were gay and being forced to “repent” of his homosexuality. I’ll bet that would become news.)

  • Jerry

    I think Joel makes an important point: If an evil regime is committing evil acts, when does it become news? It’s certainly worthy of what I used to think of as news magazine features, but I’m not sure that specific acts are newsworthy unless they are particularly horrific.

    We do have to watch out for the spread of the “banality of evil”, so we should see coverage at some level from time-to-time, but I’m not sure this particular situation rises to that level for the MSM.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Joel:

    So you do not think this story would interest American readers and viewers?

  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    But Joel, it isn’t just Iran that is threatening apostates with death. If you do a Google search–which professional media personnel seem to avoid doing or do not want to do–you will find that apostates from Islam have been threatened with death in Pakistan–our ally–and Afghanistan–our client state.
    In the cases in these countries the threats have not been carried through as far as I can tell.
    But all across the Islamic world most Moslems are convinced that Sharia law calls for the death of apostates from Islam. Even those Moslems I have read who want to modernize Islam agree that Islamic law calls for the execution of apostates.
    Shouldn’t the American public be made aware of this by our mass media considering how much money we pour into Moslem countries????

  • Bram

    There’s no persecution of Christians in the eyes of the MSM — just troublemakers getting their just desserts.

    Joel and Jerry presumably would not have wanted coverage of Kristallnacht in1938.

    After all, it was just Nazis being Nazis, right?

    Got news?

    Nope, just business and usual — nothing to see here, so move along.

  • http://ontheotherfoot.blogspot.com Joel

    Bram, I didn’t say I didn’t want coverage. I said I thought the lack of coverage was because Iranian human rights abuses are so common as to be “dog bites man” as far as editors are concerned.

    Tmatt, I know it would interest me and most of the people I know. I’m disappointed that there’s been almost no mainstream coverage. I think it would be of considerable interest in flyover country. But I wonder if the news chiefs in the urban east see it with the same interest.

  • Julia

    Meanwhile very little attention is being paid to the Catholic bishops who disappear now & then in the run-up to illicit “ordinations” of bishops chosen by the Chinese government. Is this ho hum because we expect this now from the Chinese government and it doesn’t rate much coverage?

    http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Officials-kidnap-bishops-of-Guangdong-to-force-them-to-take-part-in-illicit-Shantou-ordination-22064.html

    It’s rather similar to the “womenpriests” events. Mean old vatican won’t let the Chinese choose their own bishops. Or at least that’s what the tone of this BBC article implies.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11937807

    I’m trying to Google coverage of the most recent disappearance of licitly ordained bishops, but am having trouble.

    I found something on Free Republic that is quoting a Turkish newspaper. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2739571/posts

    Voice of America has a late June story that a Catholic priest was arrested who was scheduled to be ordained as a Vatican-approved Chinese bishop.

    http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2011/06/30/arrest-halts-ordination-of-catholic-bishop-in-china/

    It took some digging but I finally found this from the July 8th New York Times on-line;I have no idea where it appeared in the hard copy.
    Titled Vatican Condemnation of New Chinese Bishop Worsens Tensions
    By ANDREW JACOBS    , the situation is presented as a “clash” as if the NYT has decided that the Vatican really doesn’t have the right to approve its own bishops. Kind of like the “clash” between Copts and the Muslims who are burning down their church.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/world/asia/09china.html?_r=1&ref=romancatholicchurch

    However the NYT does bury this at the very end:

    When Chinese church officials gathered in Leshan last week for the ordination, the planned consecration of another bishop in northern Hebei Province ended much differently.

    Bishop-elect Joseph Sun Jigen, whose appointment had been approved by the pope, was reported to have been forced into a police car three days before the planned ceremony. The ceremony was canceled and, as of earlier this week, the would-be bishop, according to parishioners, was still being held at a guesthouse.

    There he goes again – the Pope being provocative.

  • Bram

    Julia,

    The Pope’s just being the same mean ol’ party-pooping fundie that he always is.

    “Smart,” “well-educated” New York Times readers all know — since Thomas Friedman said so — that the U.S. would be much better off as a one-party state (one guess as to which party) just like China … or, for that matter, Iran.

  • Bram

    Joel,

    So — regardless of your personal preference — you would still have been willing to defend a hypothetical editor in 1938 who took a pass on covering Kristallnacht, since it was merely a case of dog (Nazi) biting man (Jew) yet again?

    The logic of your argument above would lead one to think that your answer is “yes.”

  • http://ontheotherfoot.blogspot.com Joel

    Bram, I think maybe I’m not being clear. I’m not defending or justifying the editorial decisions. I’m analyzing the reasons that an editor or reporter might have for thinking such a story wasn’t significant, assuming it even showed up on his radar.

    And an editor who DID cover Kristallnacht in 1938 would be in a camp by 1939. Our newscritters don’t have that worry.

  • John M.

    Soi-disant “Gay Girl in Damascus” soi-disant “disappearance” coverage and coverage of this event: compare and contrast.

    -John

  • Bram

    Joel,

    We’re talking about U.S. media coverage of events in Iran, and my test-case involving Kristallnacht has to with U. S. media coverage of events in Germany. No U. S. journalist reporting on Kristallnacht in 1938 was going to end up in a concentration camp in 1939, any more than any U. S. journalist reporting on this case in Iran is going to end imprisoned in Iran in 2012. All the more reason why it’s bizarre for the media not to cover this case in Iran and for you to make excuses for their not doing so. I think John M. hits the nail on the head: Christians, unlike “gay girls” and especially “gay boys,” are not persons about whom the MSM care — not even when 200 million Christians are being persecuted around the world today and 1 million of them have been martyred around the world in the past ten years.

  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    I had been looking for an internet site that keeps a tally that the Western mass media does nowhere that I can find–a running tally of Islamic connected violence around the world.
    I just stumbled on a site titled: “Islam-The Religion of Peace.com” which seems accurate based on the trickle of stories I have read that have– rarely– broken through the MSM’s barrier of silence regarding world-wide Islamic connected violence.
    In the last 3 days alone there have been Islamic connected murders reported in Thailand, Pakistan, Dagestan, and Nigeria.
    The full tally for this past June is 184 Jihad attacks in 18 countries with 5 different religions being attacked. Dead in the attacks:930. Critically injured: 1,527.
    If 930 people were killed in a natural disaster there would be copius media coverage of it and loads of analysis concerning what might have caused it and if there is any thread connecting the violence.

  • Bram

    Deacon John,

    A Christian is martyred on average every five minutes somewhere or other in the world every day.

    It would be interesting to know how often someone somewhere or other in the world is murdered in the name of Islam.

    Perhaps MSNBC could run a ticker tracking how often such events as these occur — like when Olbermann used to count the days since “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

    Not that I’m holding my breath …

  • Bill

    Thanks, Julia (#9) Good points, good links.