With all the horrible news for Christians in Iraq and elsewhere, there is one bright spot.
While we slept, Sudanese Christian Meriam Ibrahim arrived in Italy. As the UK Telegraph reports, the 27-year-old woman, who was spared a death sentence for apostasy in June for refusing to renounce Christianity, landed in Rome where she is to meet Pope Francis before traveling to the U.S.
I know she will appreciate all of you who prayed for her and her children and her perseverance through an almost year long-ordeal. Ibrahim and her family were flown to Italy in a government aircraft to Rome accompanied by Italy’s deputy minister for foreign affairs, Lapo Pistelli, who flew to Sudan to collect her late Wednesday.
There are many more Christians in Sudan who deserve our prayers. As the Telegraph reports, “Olivia Warham, director of Waging Peace, a UK NGO that campaigns against genocide and systematic human rights violations in Sudan, said millions of Sudanese Christians faced daily brutality and ethnic cleansing by the Sudanese regime.”
“Three years ago President Omar al-Bashir made it plain there would be no room for non-Muslims in his Islamist Sudan. He has been good to his word, crushing dissent and systematically killing ethnic and religious minorities. Regular aerial bombardment by the Sudanese armed forces destroys communities and Christian hospitals, forcing people to flee from their fields to hide in the Nuba mountains,” she said.”
“It is shocking that Bashir’s ideology of elimination provokes nothing more than the occasional words of regret from the international community, when we should be applying targeted smart sanctions on the architects of these atrocities.” As we reported yesterday, there is scant comment on the complete elimination of Christians in the Mosul in Iraq.
The Italian government and the Vatican led the way in securing Ibrahim’s release, something I wish our own American government had done. As we’ve written here, she is married to a naturalized American citizen and therefore her two children are American citizens.
I hope she is given the same compassion here in America – legally — as those who are entering illegally.
