Christians, Muslim Extremists, and Lies in E-Mails
Americans are on edge with the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) advancing through Iraq and killing people in mass executions, taking over city after city. This includes two of the country’s very important cities, Mosul and Qaraqosh.
Mosul is ancient Nineveh and Iraq’s second largest city. It fell on July 7, when ISIS came into the city and warned Christians that they had three choices: convert to Islam, pay jizya (a poll tax levied on non-Muslims), or die at the hands of the ISIS. All the Christians fled the city. Hundreds of thousands of Christian refugees resettled in tent camps in Kurdistan. Many fled to the Kurdish capital city, Erbil.
A month later, Qaraqosh, a city of 50,000 and the Christian capital in Iraq, fell to ISIS. The city was being protected by Kurdish forces, but they had withdrawn, allowing ISIS to advance into the city. According to The Guardian, the city “was all but abandoned” by the time ISIS arrived. “Most residents fled before dawn as convoys of extremists drew near.” A couple weeks later, NBC confirmed this, reporting “Just weeks after the town fell to ISIS fighters, only a few dozen Christians remain in Qaraqosh and streets are now deserted…Maybe only 50 to 75 Christian people, most of them elderly, are there, unable to flee.”
ISIS then beheaded two American journalists and a British aid-worker. With the deaths of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, American anxiety concerning ISIS got to the boiling point, and this pushed President Barak Obama to announce that the United States would begin attacking ISIS.
Many American Christians have been taught to be highly suspicious of those who practice Islam. Muslims, according to some Christian teachers and ultra-conservative political pundits, are the ultimate evil in the world, and Christians should be willing to take up arms against them. However, some Christians know Muslims who are loving and peaceable people, who proclaim they follow a faith the denounces the Jihadist violence of the radical Muslim faction.
And when Christians see ISIS, we get anxious.
Christians in America are a strange lot, aren’t we? We say we that embrace the gospel, that God loves the whole world so much that He gave His one and only Son, and we proclaim the ethics of Jesus, an ethic that says “Love your enemies.”
And yet.
When we feel threatened, when we feel vulnerable, we get all panicky. When terrorists seek to terrorize, the ones who should have peace in the midst of a fallen world are among the first to succumb to the terror. We are the first to give the terrorists exactly what they want.
And so I received this forwarded email a month ago, an email that has gone viral:
This is urgent news from Samaritans Purse
This was sent to me for prayer from Chaplains with Rapid Response Team. Pray & pass to others.
Dear Friends, Just a few minutes ago I received the following text message on my phone from Sean Malone who leads Crisis Relief International (CRI). We then spoke briefly on the phone and I assured him that we would share this urgent prayer need with all of our contacts.
“We lost the city of Queragosh (Qaraqosh). It fell to ISIS and they are beheading children systematically. This is the city we have been smuggling food too. ISIS has pushed back Peshmerga (Kurdish forces) and is within 10 minutes of where our CRI team is working. Thousands more fled into the city of Erbil last night. The UN evacuated it’s staff in Erbil. Our team is unmoved and will stay. Prayer cover needed!”
Please pray sincerely for the deliverance of the people of Northern Iraq from the terrible advancement of ISIS and its extreme Islamic goals for mass conversion or death for Christians across this region.
May I plead with you not to ignore this email. Do not forward it before you have prayed through it. Then send it to as many people as possible. Send it to friends and Christians you may know. Send it to your prayer group. Send it to your pastor and phone him/her to pray on Sunday during the service – making a special time of prayer for this. We need to stand in the gap for our fellow Christians.
Wow, I thought. This is frightening! Children are being systematically beheaded! With the name of Samaritan’s Purse on the email, it immediately got credence.
But my next thought was, Really? Something seems fishy about this.
I remembered a viral video that was making the rounds over a month ago from CNN that had an interview with “a prominent leader of the Chaldean Christian community,” Mark Arabo. (See below). Arabo stated that “a Christian holocaust is in our midst” and claimed that “children are being beheaded.”
[tvideo type=”youtube” clip_id=”8GPjqY0ViVE” autoplay=”false”]
And yet, in spite of everyone citing this video of a guy who lives in California (yes, Arabo, this “prominent leader” of Iraqi Christians was interviewed via Skype not from Mosul but from San Diego!) as evidence that children were being beheaded, there has been not one shred of evidence that it actually happened.
…Until this email that is.
So I tweeted and emailed Crisis Relief International (the organization claimed to be the originator of the report), The Billy Graham Association’s Rapid Response Team (the organization claimed to send out the email prayer request in response to CRI’s report), and Samaritan’s Purse (the organization from which it is claimed the email has been forwarded).
I received an email from “Ronnie” at CRI that stated,
“This message was originally shared as a text to a handful of our partners a few weeks ago. A couple of them shared it through their networks and it went viral after that.
We are working with local pastors, leaders, and military. All of the information we have shared has been from first hand accounts of people on the ground, partner agencies, and news agencies. The circulating email is a few weeks old but I have included updates below… Since the original post, the US sent airstrikes that allowed the Kurdish forces to push Isis back and bring a level of security to the area. Our team is safe and still on the ground serving thousands of refugees on a daily basis. Most of the NGO’s pulled out and it left the area without any relief.”
On September 19, I wrote Ronnie back asking if the head of CRI, Sean Malone, actually sent this email or actually can confirm the beheading of children, and I have not received a reply.
Meanwhile, Samaritan’s Purse tweeted back to me:
@Bob_Robinson_re We didn't send this prayer request nor did we authorize use of our name. See how we're helping Iraq: http://t.co/OvHKDnQFwt
— Samaritan's Purse (@SamaritansPurse) September 16, 2014
Amanda Duke of Samaritan’s Purse followed up with an email stating,
“Samaritan’s Purse did not send out the urgent prayer request you received from Parkwood Baptist Church, nor did we authorize use of our name.”
And when I asked for more details, she graciously wrote me back, saying,
“No one at either Samaritan’s Purse or the Billy Graham Evangelical Association has been able to trace the origin of this disturbing email message and prayer request. Both organizations have been responding in a manner very similar to the previous email you received from us, with a disclaimer appropriate to the particular organization.
We apologize for any miscommunication or confusion generated by our previous email. We hope you receive additional information soon that is able to add clarity and calmness to the situation. Thank you for your prayerful concern.”
The BGEA Rapid Response Team’s webmaster, M. Hand, wrote me, stating,
“We appreciate your concern about the recent forward that has been circulating regarding a text message. We have confirmed with our Rapid Response Team that no next message was received by them from CRI about the fall of a city to ISIS. The only information of this nature that was received by our Rapid Response Team was the forward in question claiming to originate with a text to them. The e-mail forward is incorrect and the text message was never received by our Rapid Response Team.”
The war drums are beating and propaganda is being dropped on Christians like leaflets from a plane.
What will we do about it?
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:7)
__________________________
Image: Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee to Erbil after the Islamic State advanced on their city. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
For more Christian commentary on the reports of Christian children being beheaded, see Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition “FactChecker: Is ISIS beheading children in Iraq?”
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