The New York Times is owned and largely controlled by Non-Christians.
This should explain the hate and deceit spread by this apex of "yellow journalism>"
Posted on 12/31/2002 12:53:44 AM PST by twntaipan
As evangelical Christian emissaries have spread throughout the Muslim world, their presence has increasingly proved to be a lightning rod for anti-American sentiment while provoking the anger of native Christian sects and Islamic clerics.
The murder of three American missionaries yesterday at the hospital where they worked in Yemen, and the killing of another American missionary in southern Lebanon in November, underscored the dangers of working at the intersection of religion and politics.
The negative reaction is not limited to Muslim countries, but has been seen in Hindu-dominated nations like India, where a Christian missionary family was burned to death in an attack three years ago.
"With the rise of religious politics, missionaries come into the cross hairs of Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists," said Bernard Haykel, an assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies and history at New York University. "Certainly as the Arab and Muslim world has become more radicalized Islamically, people have become more aware of missionaries and more irritated by them."
Christian missionaries have been active across much of the Muslim Middle East for hundreds of years, at least as far back as the Crusades.
But successive generations of missionaries found that proselytizing to Muslims was a dangerous business. Under Muslim law, conversion from Islam is punishable by death.
Rather than enrage local authorities and risk their own deaths or expulsions, missionaries aimed for softer targets. American Protestant missionaries in the 19th century, for example, built universities and hospitals and tried to convert Coptic Christians in Egypt and Greek Orthodox Christians in Lebanon.
The Orthodox and Coptic churches, which have lived among Muslims for centuries, know how to cultivate their own flocks without threatening the political territory of Muslim rulers and clerics. The newly arrived evangelical Christian groups, in the view of these older indigenous churches, trample the unwritten rules.
In Lebanon, the Roman Catholic diocese and Muslim groups have accused the evangelical Christians of trying to convert Muslims. One bishop said Bonnie Penner Witherall, the missionary killed by a gunman last month, combined preaching about Christianity with the distribution of toys and food to Muslim children.
When the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan arrested eight Western evangelical Christian aid workers in 2001, they made similar accusations, saying the workers had been distributing Christian literature and should be killed. The eight were freed during the American attack on the Taliban, and later one acknowledged that they had shown Afghans a film about Jesus.
Proselytizing sects like the Southern Baptist Convention, which owns the hospital in Jibla, Yemen, where the missionaries were killed, have said they do not actively seek to convert people if prohibited by government authorities.
Jerry Rankin, president of the International Mission Board, which runs the missionary activities of the Southern Baptists, asserted that the missionaries in Jibla promoted Christianity by example.
"Our people naturally do respect the religious beliefs of others," said Mr. Rankin, "and they try to relate to people in a loving way through friendships and relationships."
Still, the hospital has not avoided entanglement in Yemen's religious politics. In 1995 it was accused by Islah, an opposition political party, of defaming Islam and proselytizing among Yemen's Muslims.
Although a court dismissed the charges, the incendiary message of the lawsuit was not lost on some of its local backers. The State Department, in its reports on human rights in Yemen, said Muslim hospital employees continued to be harassed by Islah members for several years.
More recently the number of volunteer missionaries has exploded, with some 7,000 college and high school students signing up for short-term evangelical missions overseas.
The Mission Board's Web site also boasts of a record number of baptisms — 395,773 so far this year — as a result of its foreign missionary work. "There is discussion on strategy changes, to become less institutional and to work primarily in church-planting and face-to-face evangelism," said Jack Graham, a Texas pastor and current president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "When you're up close and personal with someone hopefully they will believe in you."
In accordance with that strategy, Pastor Graham said, the Baptists have already decided to turn over their hospital in Yemen to a local Muslim group and shift resources to mobile clinics that would bring missionaries into contact with more Yemenis.
The missionaries who have died are martyrs, the pastor said. "This is not a conflict between religions but a conflict between God and Satan, between good and evil," he said. "We want to be sensitive to the political climate. We certainly want to work with governments where our missions have been placed and we don't want to create a political/religious crisis. But as far as the Southern Baptists are concerned, we will continue to express our love for God."
Whether the bigot laws are in Israel or in Muslim countries, it must not be up to the Baptist preacher to determine whether those hearing him are Muslim, nominal Christians, or totally unattached. If they listen to him, that is enough.
The word martyr is from the Greek, marturion, which meant "witness." It was applied to the early Christians who, thanks to government persecution, often were killed because of their witness. Thus "witness" (marturion) came to mean "one killed because of his witness."
This means the islamic fruit salads who blow themselves up are not martyrs; they do not have their lives taken from them because they testify to the truth of islam. They are only murderers.
What The Slimes inadvertantly does is make the case that people in the Mideast, though supposedly living in a rich culture and practicing a "religion of peace", are basically brain-dead killers who can't control themselves. The Slimes is hopeless.
Curious that they felt the need to convert Christians to Christianity (at least their particular version). This speaks volumes.
The reference was to the fact that the Copts and Orthodox under Moslem oppression know how to spread the Gospel without trumpeting their own horns.
Care to quote the part where we're told to go and convert other Christians?
The Orthodox are passive proselytizers, in other words you convert through good works and personal example or something like that. See the Greek conversion of the Pagan Slavs as an example.
The New York Times is owned and largely controlled by Non-Christians.
This should explain the hate and deceit spread by this apex of "yellow journalism>"
The First Amendment was framed for an openly partisan press, such as the newspapers in which Jefferson and Hamilton waged their political battles. IOW, a press with no pretense to objectivity.A press arrogant enough to believe itself to be objective is a press which sees the First Amendment as a loophole for non-objective nuisances such as Rush Limbaugh--or for that matter, Free Republic. A press which, odd as it may seem, is contemptuous of the First Amendment.
Politicians and journalists--and not the public at large--were the only real supporters of McCain-Feingold. And that is by no means an accident. The whole idea of "public relations" is that we-the-people are easily swayed by symbolism. The ones who are difficult to con are the ones with the strongest tendency to put things into perspective--the conservatives.
Curious that people who believe in rule of law would try to convince those who believe in pure unfettered democracy (mobocracy) to adopt their point of view.
Curious that Liberals would go into the newspaper/television news business.
This all speaks volumes!!!
We all believe that any idea, any truth that we believe will help others and/or make a better society is worth sharing. Some people just want to muzzle that which they don't want to hear, which testifies to the truth of the Christian message. Why would people so oppose a teaching that results in human rights, sacrificial service for others, a healthier society, economic prosperity and the propagation of ideas by moral persuasion rather than at the point of a gun? The teaching of Christianity is that there is an element of evil darkness in the world that rejects the light and exists in, and holds in bondage, every human being apart from the grace of God. The mission of Christianity is to tell everyone that through faith in Christ they can be free from that bondage to evil. If this message is true how can anyone expect a Christian to not share it with others, including within Christian cultures, where this is not fully understood?
Secular humanists and merit based religious systems like Islam reject Chritianity partly because the implication that there is an evil within ourselves that requires us to seek God's grace is highly offensive to those biased by that evil.
And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, "We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man's blood upon us." But Peter and the apostles answered, "We must obey God rather than men. [Acts 5:27-29]
Because the NYT is of the world. The world hates Christ and Christ's representatives here on earth. Their foolish hearts have been darkened and their condemnation is upon them.
We have Muslim "missionaries" operating in the United States, with their most fertile ground of operation being in prisons. Would we be justified in shooting such Muslims in the United States? Would the Times refer to such shootings here as a "negative reaction"?
Put the shoe on the other foot and see how it fits. It doesn't. Therefore, the Times is slime, in its "reporting."
Did I miss anything?
Congressman Billybob
Click for latest column on UPI, "Incision Decision in the Senate" (Not yet on UPI wire, or FR.)
As the politician formerly known as Al Gore has said, my book, "to Restore Trust in America"
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